Rather than try to define what "average" may or may not be, let's just say that we are trapped in an economic quandary because of health care COSTS ... not the care itself
I'm no business wizard, but I can chew gum and walk at the same time ... and if the insurance companies have a history of getting $45 for a bandaid ... maybe THAT'S (A) point to start looking
But back to the living wage controversy .... As I analyze the costs of housing and food, mobilization and a few et cetera's ... it seems $20 an hour is a barely break even amount and NO ONE is going to pay a kid 20 bucks an hour to flip burgers
I thionk the problem is in how We as a nation are THINKING about what we NEED to live
I'm not so naive to suggest we go back to some stone age lifestyle ... but I AM suggesting we look at what the government has been doing to us ... analyze the low (if any) profit margin most small businesses have (with a myriad of headaches .. and even punishments) ... and SEE that "they" have actually reduced us TO that quasi stone age life style while we struggle to keep up the pace
America needs psychotherapy, not more money
Our problem(s) devolve from poor thinking habits
We USED TO BE the greatest on the Earth ... obumbles is only putting the icing on a flat cake
That then-and-now price comparison of “everything” is apples vs oranges.
That $45 bandaid comes with its fair share of costs delivering it, a combination of: emergency transport, urgent/ER admission process, crazy expensive per sq ft facility, nurse, PA/doctor’s time, enumeration of possible causes & consequences, insurance processing, etc. No fair comparing that to a $0.45 bandaid you applied yourself after getting reamed out by your mother for doing something stupid. YET...everyone expects the full-premium-service at DIY cost.
A phone costs somewhere around $100/mo ($40, $160, whatever), times number of tween-and-up family members, and includes instant access to the near-totality of human knowledge. No fair comparing that the wired single-function single-family poor-quality phone that you used in emergencies by walking a mile at night in a blizzard and banging on a stranger’s door to ask to use because your car was in the ditch (golly, where’d that example come from?).
TV can easily exceed $100/mo, displayed on a 55+” HDTV costing >$1000, with 200 channels, pristine clarity, and even a “pause live stream” DVR. No fair comparing that to a grainy SD box receiving 3 channels.
Dinner costs somewhere around $5-10/plate, including on-demand preparation or ready-to-nuke. No fair comparing that to laboriously turning $2 of staple ingredients into a meal feeding four.
Housing costs ... well, let’s say that I was watching the movie _Winter’s_Bone_ about a poor family heating & cooking with a wood stove and making do with used goods, when I was startled upon realizing that the “poor” accommodations portrayed closely approximated my “upper middle class” lifestyle.
And so on.
Our “norm” is a sea of luxuries normalized to a baseline which the well-off of the past would have despaired aspiring to.
Advertising has convinced us we “need” all this, and prosperity has made it easy to get it with little effort. Now people are bitching that they can’t afford a luxurious lifestyle, and are entitled to the surplus of others to achieve it just because they breathe.
You’re right. The problem started a long time before they ended up voting in Obama. Obama is just the result, not the start of our troubles.