Posted on 08/31/2009 3:31:25 AM PDT by CutePuppy
Fewer Americans are afraid that they will be unable to pay for healthcare services and fewer expect to postpone medical treatments due to costs, according to a Thomson Reuters survey published Monday.
Researchers found a steady increase in people's confidence about their ability to pay for healthcare services — it rose 12 percent between March and July this year.
The survey of 3,000 households showed, unsurprisingly, that people who made more money were more confident they could pay for medical care, and people who had insurance were far more confident about paying than those who lacked insurance.
"These findings are consistent with data we've been seeing for everything from hospital discharge trends to opinions about healthcare reform," said Gary Pickens, chief research officer for the Healthcare & Science business of Thomson Reuters.
"There is growing optimism among many healthcare consumers, but (there) also is a clear disparity in outlook between those with higher income levels who have insurance coverage and those who are uninsured.
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(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
Most economists in the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) semi-annual poll were concerned about the outlook for the U.S. government budget. Also, they doubted health-care reforms proposed by the Obama administration would lower costs while increasing access and maintaining quality.
"This is one of the fastest-moving and most controversial economic policy environments we have experienced in a generation," said NABE president Chris Varvares. "The more vexing policy challenges about which there is less agreement are federal health-care ... budget policies."
The government early this year stepped in with a $787 billion package of spending and tax cuts to break the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Separately, it bailed out banks to prevent the financial system from collapsing.
Those actions left the economy saddled with a $1.58 trillion budget deficit in fiscal 2009, and a shortfall of about $9 trillion between 2010 and 2019.
The ballooning budget deficit is causing alarm and feeding into opposition to President Barack Obama's central policy priority of overhauling the U.S. health-care system, whose price tag is $1 trillion.
While economists in the NABE survey acknowledged that the stimulus package had helped to brake the pace of the economy's decline in the second quarter, only 35 percent viewed fiscal policy as being "about right".
Half of the respondents saw fiscal policy as too stimulative. About 266 members took part in the poll which was conducted between August 3-18.
The U.S. economy contracted at a 1.0 percent annual rate in the second quarter after collapsing 6.4 percent in the first three months of the year.
"Fully 76 percent do not believe a second stimulus package is needed. Three-quarters responded that they would like to see fiscal policy become more restrictive over the next two years, but only 28 percent expect that it will be," the NABE said. "In fact, the largest share, nearly 42 percent, expects fiscal policy to become even more stimulative than it is now." .....
Years of brainwashing disolved in a cup of tea.
Ah, the irony!
I have no fear of the healthcare costs through the private enterprise system; I’m scared to death of the costs of government healthcare.
This is so twisted... the statists over the years have engineered a situation where health insurance costs are in the stratosphere (think bureaucracy, regulation, jury awards/malpractice insurance) so that we wouldn’t mind when they “offered” government care, and now the public is starting to wake up, and saying they’ll take the artificially bloated health care costs over the government takeover.
Ah yes, rich people just don't care about the poor.
“Researchers found a steady increase in people’s confidence about their ability to pay for healthcare services”
I think what this really means it that there a steady increase in people’s confidence about the ability to get someone else to pay for their healthcare services.
This is because now they realize that when it’s “free”, they won’t be able to afford health care at all.
bump
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