>There is NO WAY an ordinary wage-earner could have saved enough to cover the sort of insurance-inflated medical bills >common today.
>If true, then by what magic of aggregation can a group of such people afford something that most individuals cannot >afford? >There are only two possibilities I can think of: >(1) A fraction of the group members have saved a great deal, enough to support the rest of the group >(2) A different group will pay to support the group that did not save enough I have tended not to answer you John because I have not been able to solve the problem of dialog with you. Whenever I use facts or correlations to support an argument you point to the causal density of economics (not your term but a neat term I found explaining why social sciences aren't science) to state that there is no way to use data to point to conclusions....even if the data is so simple as people getting negative interest from T-Bills shows an extreme flight to safety. But, in this case, we have an obvious solution. Medical costs are skyrocketing....uniquely so in the United States. People in the medical field are making enormous amounts of money, compared to their contemporaries in other developed countries. While folks have heard horror stories about medical care in the UK and Canada, etc. surveys of satisfaction with care get greater percentages of people who are satisfied in those countries than in the US....so they can't be all that worse. So, a single payer system, with the right of rich people to spend whatever extra that they want which pays the going rate for medical care in every other developed country would cost a lot less money. It's the threat of doctors to go to Blue Cross, which presently pays much more (my sister who bills for her husband who's a physician says he gets about $120 from Blue Cross, $80 from Medicare, and $40 from Medicade for the exact same service) that keeps the government dolling out the money at high rates (well the high voting percentages of the elderly who are scared of this actually does it). If we paid primary care physicians $100k/year, specialists $130k/year, and about as much as every other developed country for all the other parts of medical care, as well as required malfeasance for malpractice, we'd be able to reverse the inflation in Medicare....and have costs in line with what is affordable. As for Social Security, if we capped the highest SS payment to inflation instead of the increase in the average income, and got back on the GDP/capita growth rate of 1960-2005 (number picked out of my head, not cherry picked. Pick any other two dates between 1940 and 2007 which are at least 30 years apart, and I'll be happy to use that.) SS taxes would actually be able to go down in 30 years with ZPG. We had a big discussion on this here around 2005 and the numbers are pretty easy to crank out. So, that's the other option. The real problem, as I see it, is that the GDP growth from 2000-2008 was mostly tied to the housing bubble and bank profits. If you look at jobs growth from 1939-2010, and take a mean percentage growth per year as the baseline, you will see the US starting to fall off the baseline in 2001. The last 3 years have been very bad, but real growth stopped when the internet bubble burst. Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
