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- The budget deficit was almost $1.3 trillion during the first ten months of the fiscal year (through July).
- That’s up from $389 billion at this point last year.
- Spending has risen 21% over last year, while tax revenues have fallen by 17%.
- CBO estimates that $125 billion of the increased spending and decreased revenues are the result of this year’s stimulus act.
Tax revenues have fallen off a cliff.
- Revenues have fallen 17% this year, adding $353 billion to the deficit.
- The decline has been particularly sharp for corporate incomes taxes (down 57%) and individual income taxes (down 20%).
Spending on TARP and the GSEs.
- CBO estimates that spending to date on TARP will have net cost to taxpayers of $169 billion (For more details on how CBO calculates this, see this post.)
- In addition, the government has injected $83 billion into Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE), the two housing GSEs.
- Together, these parts of the financial rescue have added $252 billion to the deficit.
- Spending on other programs has increased 14%, adding $325 billion to the deficit.
- Defense spending is up 8%
- Medicare spending is up 15%.
- Unemployment benefits are up more than 160%
- Medicaid up 24%
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- Has the Executive and Legislative branches ever heard of "SPENDING CUTS?"
- Does the Executive and Legislative branches have any idea who buys up all this debt they issue?
- The Chinese and the Japanese, that's who!! With each country's wealthiest individuals buying up major portions of most large cities, guess who's gonna own The United States??
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Fact #1. Freedom of speech is a given right in the Constitution
- Free discourse of opinion and political debate is allowed according to our Constitution.
- In fact, freedom of speech has been upheld by the Supreme Court in opinions related to previous challenges to the First Amendment.
- We do not want a society where Big Brother watches us, as happens in communist countries;
- or where we tattle on our neighbors, as occurred in Nazi Germany.
Fact #2. Medicare/Medicaid government programs have consistently exceeded original cost estimates and have grown faster than private insurance costs. As noted in the Wall Street Journal last week,
- Medicare spending in the first nine months of this fiscal year is $314 billion and growing by 10%.
- The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the House bill will increase the deficit by $239 billion over the next decade.
- However, beyond the 10 years, the net costs of new spending will increase at more than 8% per year between 2019 and 2029, while new revenue would only grow at about 5%.
- In other words, the cost burden to taxpayers for this program will be huge and will last for a long time to come. Taxing private insurance firms to pay for the government plan won’t work, as the private firms will simply pass along those costs to their customers. Raising taxes on employers will simply shift the costs of healthcare to the public sector.
Fact #3. End of life treatments account for a large portion of Medicare costs.
- According to the latest Business Week, a UnitedHealth report prepared for lawmakers finds that
- 27% of Medicare’s budget is now spent during the last year of older patients’ lives, often on questionable hospital tests and procedures.
- Expanded hospice coverage and other services could save significant amounts, perhaps $18 billion over 10 years, according to the article.
- Purchase of long-term care insurance by individuals could also ease the financial burden for end of life treatment costs.
Fact #4: Any government health insurance plan that tries to compete with the private sector by focusing on affordability will inevitably offer cheaper rates and drive all insurance into a single payer plan.
- While the Administration says it simply wants to offer another alternative to the private sector,
- the reality is that the private sector will be unable to compete with a government run plan that offers insurance at below market rates to make coverage more affordable.
- Employers will naturally cede insurance coverage to the government plan to cut their own costs.
Fact #5: U.S. insurers have already openly indicated a willingness to consider moving to a ”take-all-comers marketplace”, whereby they will accept all applicants, regardless of age or medical history.
- If private insurers follow through on accepting all applicants, the need for a universal health insurance plan is partly obviated.
- A better solution to a single payer plan is to have consumers assume higher co-pays for everyday medical costs within the private sector, with insurance coverage focused more on those high end expenses that can truly bankrupt families.
- Even the State of Massachusetts -- the model that serves as the basis for the Obama plan -- is having problems:
- a scaling back of initial benefits, rising taxes, and higher costs.
- France, which has long had a single payer plan, has tried to adopt more American-style methods such as increased co-pays to cut increasing expenses.
- The state insurer in France has been operating in the red since 1989. The Japanese government fixes the costs for treatment, resulting in low doctor pay, bankrupt hospitals, and demand for supplemental health insurance coverage to fill the gaps in the government plan.
- In Canada, waiting lists for various treatments are said to cost $14 billion a year nationally in lost economic activity, and there is a chronic shortage of doctors.
- Despite the universal plan, many Canadians cross the border to seek treatment in the U.S. when faced with long waits and expensive treatments.
1.We should work to improve the existing private health insurance sector and encourage supplemental insurance to fill the gaps in such coverage, before we introduce any new government insurance plan. 2. We should encourage higher co-pays for everyday ailments to cut overuse of healthcare facilities, focusing attention instead on catastrophic issues. 3. We should establish a national cap on medical malpractice lawsuits, as has already been done in many states. High malpractice insurance costs lead to higher medical costs and force many good physicians to abandon their practices. 4. We should look into expanded hospice coverage for end of life care. 5. We should provide more information on diet and exercise and do more to incentivize individuals to adopt healthier lifestyles via lower insurance rates. 6. Before we do anything else, we should cut inefficiency in existing government programs.
[Note To Sarah Palin....]
Good day, Ms Palin; I, along with many other Americans, are casting about for some QUALIFIED representation who still retain their ability not only to hear, BUT TO LISTEN!! Now is the time to put together a regimen which will return the welfareRATs to the working class-excepting those who are truely in need. After reading the above entry, one should remember some of Benjamin Franklin's quotes:
- There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.
- Think what you do when you run into debt; you give another power over your liberty.
- When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic. Sell not liberty to purchase power.
One needs only to look to whom a large portion of the budgeted federal monies go. Social engineering of the FDR and LBJ administrations may have had good intentions, but have had devastating results!! The obama/ACORN administration is wont to follow in those calamitous footsteps.
Take a look at the statistics:
- There were an estimated 96 million households in 1993, 722,000 more than in 1992.
- The average annual rate of growth in the number of households has decreased over the past 20 years from 2.4 percent in the 1970’s, to 1.4 percent in the 1980’s, to 1.1 percent from 1990 to 1993.
- In 1993, there were 68 million family households: 78 percent (53 million) were married-couple families, 18 percent (12 million) were families maintained by a woman alone, and 4 percent (3 million) were maintained by a man alone. (A family has at least two members with at least one who is a relative of the householder.)
- There were 28 million nonfamily households, most of which contained only one person, The proportion of all parent-child family groups maintained by single parents rose dramatically from 13 percent in 1970 to 30 percent in 1993.
- Nearly 75 percent of these “single” parents either had never married (36 percent) or were divorced (38 percent) in 1993.
- The absent parent was usually the father (86 percent of single-parent situations).
- A majority of Black family groups with children were maintained by single parents in 1993 (63 percent), compared with 25 percent among Whites.
- This is much larger than in 1970, when the percentages were 36 percent and 10 percent, respectively.
- More than 1 in 3 (35 percent) Hispanic family groups with children were maintained by single parents in 1993, compared with 26 percent in 1980 (comparable 1970 data are not available for Hispanics). (Persons of Hispanic origin may be of any race.)
- In 1991, almost one-fourth of preschoolers were cared for primarily in an organized facility while their mothers were at work.
- In fall 1991, there were 31 million children under 15 living with their employed mothers (55 percent of all children under 15).
- Of these 31 million children, 10 million were preschoolers under 5.
- Among these preschoolers, 23 percent (2 million) were in an organized child care facility, such as a nursery school;
- 36 percent (4 million) were cared for in their own home; and 31 percent (3 million) were cared for in another home.
- 1 Parent-child family groups have at least one never-married own child under 18 living in them, and include family households, related subfamilies, and unrelated subfamilies.
As is blatantly apparent, the socialist policies of previous democRAT a-n-d republicRAT administrations have bred several generations who feel they are entitled to government funded EVERYTHING, from cradle to grave-without lifting a finger to earn just one benefit. Laziness--NOT RACE, is the primary factor in this mindset!
- Now add to the aforementioned costs for public assistance in all forms, the economic costs of supporting many millions of illegal immigrants.
- Mexico's third largest cash infusion [after exports and oil sales] is the money sent home by the illegal immigrants in America.
- Every year, more and more illegal immigrants use the nation's emergency rooms as their personal "doctor's office."
HOW COVERAGE VARIES--Illegal immigrants are less likely to have health coverage than others:
Types of Adults Uninsured
- U.S. citizens 14%
- Legal immigrants 25%
- Illegal immigrants 59%
Children Type Uninsured
- U.S. citizens 9%
- Citizens whose parents are legal immigrants 13%
- Foreign-born children of legal immigrants 25%
- Citizens with illegal immigrant parents 25%
- Foreign-born children of illegal immigrants 53%
- Look at the stats; the 14% of Americans uninsured are most probably those young "20-somethings or 30-somethings" who with few exceptions, would be wasting their money in healthcare insurance!
- The stats also indicate the largest abusers of America's healthcare system: Citizens with illegal immigrant parents [25%] and foreign-born children of illegal immigrants [53%]! They need no healthcare insurance!! They already know that they WILL BE TREATED during each and every emergency room appearance; They already know that if they don't pay the fees, the affected hospital will just "write off" the expense by adding it to those who do not abuse the system: You and I!!!
Til Nex'Time....
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