Posted on 12/03/2010 6:37:18 PM PST by Kaslin
When reading the White House deficit commission's report, one gets the sense that authors Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles are tired of wrestling with 900-pound gorillas, of fiscal problems so Brobdingnagian that the wise course among America's political elite has been to pretend they do not exist.
But the bipartisan pair cannot quite bring themselves to say what now needs saying: that for our sake, these gorillas must die.
Simpson and Bowles offer several worthy ideas for attacking the debt and entitlement problems plaguing the United States. Acknowledging that "federal health care spending represents our single largest fiscal challenge over the long-run," they advance some solutions which are relatively unobjectionable.
They support battling Medicare fraud, canceling duplicative spending on Medicaid administration, and fully offsetting the so-called "doc fix," left out of President Obama's health care law as a bit of accounting smoke and mirrors to make the numbers look better.
In some cases, the commission laudably advocates more pro-market approaches to the problem of rising health care costs. It endorses "aggressive" medical malpractice reform, recently cited in a Wall Street Journal survey of 100 top CEOs as a top priority. It targets the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act, or "CLASS Act," a project of the late liberal saint Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, as "unsustainable," and calls for its repeal.
And the commissioners call for broad reform of Medicare's cost-saving rules, giving seniors single combined annual deductible and catastrophic protection while prohibiting first dollar coverage in Medicare supplemental insurance.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
Now, to blame the American people for the Medicare mess is unsavory. I have paid into Medicare for decades, supporting those who qualified for it while I didn't. Needless to say, like all insurance programs, Medicare is a ponzi scheme relying on those not needing the service to pay for those who do.
The brutal indebtedness of the Western Democracies is a direct measure of their utility to the world.
Each and every is a liability...a millstone around the necks of its citizens...and any assets whatsoever in them accrue only to the benefit of their administrators and enablers-i Brussels and in Washington.
Why worry? The debt is someone else’s responsibility. Not mine. Rich people are bad. We should make them pay more. BTW, wheres my Obama money? And my free house and free gas?
There are some good ideas. If at least parts of the reccomendations get enacted and ObamaCare gets repealed or ruled unconstitutional, it won’t be hopeless.
I get the feeling that we actually have and economic gorilla war being waged against us by the hard left/communist/progressives. They are trying to bankrupt us.
Calling Peggy Joseph....um...Bueller..... ?
The idea that Congress would not raid Social Security was absurd in the 1930s, is absurd today, and will be absurd a hundred years from now.
There are no trust funds, just slush funds.
I remember reading that when Soc Sec was set up the average life was 53 years old.
BS, the budget “crisis”(”Never let a good crisis go to waste” - Rahm “It down their Throats” Emmanuel)is eminently solvable. Give me five people - a retired couple, parents raising a family and a single mom) - a week in a hotel and I’ll give you a balanced budget.
I’ll also give you a deficit reduction plan that will eliminate all debt in five years. Of course, the LIBs and RINOs will go ape-sh!* over it.
"Rising health care costs" wouldn't be a national problem if individuals were responsible for paying their own way. Each person or family would choose how much income to devote to medical expenditures, based on personal priorities.
Government *is* the problem.
That was in large part due to the high infant mortality rate. You have to be careful with averages: on the average, persons in the US have 1 testicle.
The best plan people could have is catostrophic insurance, something that takes care of injuries and long term hospitalization. The unforseen things. And then the individual takes care of minor Dr visits and perscriptions and such.
I get $1000 a year for dental, paid 80%-20%, so I get $1250 in dental and I pay $250.
I have a procedure plan for the next 2 years, of what needs to be taken care of and I'll be maxing out and going beyond what insurance covers.
How much is my employer paying for $1000 a year dental that gets used up every year?
If insurance were a private matter, and I had to buy my own, I could skip regular dental coverage and just have emergency coverage or major medical/dental.
If I'm getting $1000 of dental every year I'm sure the insurance company is getting paid $1200.
My dentist has a policy that if I pay in full on day of service I get a 5% discount.
If I had to pay for my own insurance, I could save on the premiums, by not having normal dental coverage, and using those premium savings to actually pay for my dental work.
Of course now Obama doesn't want that, he wants everybody to be covered by insurance, even on coverage they might not want or need.
Instead of a world where diligence and frugality are rewarded, we want to punish those virtues and reward laziness and sloth.
LOL. yeah you’re right — on both counts.
Every employee wants their employer to provide them free healthcare.
In a free market, some employers would offer some form of medical payments, while others would say, "Here's your salary, spend it the way you want." However, we don't have that. The tax system rewards employers who compensate their employees in ways other than salary and penalizes those who don't use third-party payment. Drives up the medical usage, drives up the total amount spent.
Pick a "problem," and you can almost always find government behind it!
“on the average, persons in the US have 1 testicle.”
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I will bet you a thousand dollars against a hundred that you are wrong.
“LOL. yeah you’re right — on both counts.”
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He’s wrong on the average being one per person.
Perhaps I should restate it: “the average number of testicles in the population of the US is close to 1.0.” Better?
Definitely better, slightly less than 1.0 would be even more appropriate.
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