Monday, March 22, 2010

Healthcare Observers - Wrong On Many Accounts

I was watching a news program where the hosts and the guests, from both sides, were commenting on the recently passed healthcare.


They're wrong about healthcare - the reasons for it and the why it was so urgent to implement it. They're wrong on why the two sides disagree.

Healthcare has nothing to do with healthcare whatsoever. It has to do with a well of money that is running dry. The well I am referring to is a number of programs that had become bottomless pits of money to politicians. Unfortunately, they weren’t bottomless, and when the bottom was reached, there literally was nothing left.

I’m talking about programs such as Social Security and Medicare that were like fire hoses of money to the government that politicians grew accustomed to having at their disposal to use basically to bribe states, corporations and individuals into doing whatever they wanted them to do. There were also semi-governmental entities like Fannnie Mae and Freddie Mac that operated as essentially as political slush funds for funding re-election campaigns for politicians on both sides of the filth filled capital isles.

The reason why the two sides disagree is that on one side, you have people with a common belief that the end justifies the means in achieving their ideology. On the other side, you have people with a common belief that honesty has disappeared from the exchange of information between politicians and the people.

On one side you have an ideology that focuses on empathy for who they consider the downtrodden to the absolute exclusion of consideration of any expense that this focus may incurr. On the other side you have an ideology that focuses on ownership and self sufficiency and a set of rules that protect those ideals which, because of its focus is portrayed as being ambivalent at best, toward those who have less or who are judged to be suffering.

With the advent of socialized healthcare, there is a new firehose filling the well.  A well that might not run dry for a decade or more, but when it does, because 1) the money will almost certainly be spent, and possibly multiple times as it flows in, and 2) the outflow money will be, at a minimum, triple the inflow after that time limit has expired.  And instead of an official debt of $12 trillion, the debt will be much, much more and it will be growing at a rate that will be impossible to comprehend let alone manage.