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Is the country better off with 5.5 Trillion and counting in new debt since 2009?
Who knows? This same question is asked every time there is a budget increase, which always increases the deficit, and we have all lived with a Federal deficit for the past 50 years. The only time the U.S. had a surplus lasted less than 2 years before it was squandered.
As long as we have no inflation, and inflation is now at it's lowest for over 60 years, how high the deficit is becomes immaterial until inflation reaches economic instability. We could use some slight inflation right now- slightly cheaper dollars always put more money into circulation than price increases due to that inflation.
Right now, we are paying more for everything because of increases due to oil, weather, the economies of other nations, and other forces beyond our control. This is the new reality as the world steadily becomes more inter-connected.
Will rates go down...are you sure? Of course they will. The American medical industry is caught in a vicious upward spiral that cannot be broken by unregulated private enterprise. As it is now, we are paying more than last year, or the year before, or the year before that. More people are going un-insured, but we all end up paying for our society's health care, one way or the other, because only the completely indigent and the super wealthy do not have to worry about paying medical bills.
As a result, we are all waiting until we are sicker than we should be before seeking medical help. This perpetuates the spiral, which feeds on emergency and critical care the most.
Once this spiral is broken, we will become a society that practices much more preventative care because we will finally be able to afford the critical care at last.
What if you have a cadillac insurance plan that will get heavily taxed starting in 2018? That's a silly question. All medical insurance will become Cadillacs. By adding a huge base to the industry, all the less valuable plans will become much better, and the current Cadillac plans will go down in price because the insurers don't have to charge as much for the same services. Since there will no longer be any denial of service to everyone, the current high-priced plans will become obsolete.
Things actually showed improvement in January 2009...Obama didn't have a hand in that...why is the recovery so tepid? Because recovering from a depression is never fast or easy. The Great Depression lasted 20 years, but the U.S. didn't have the regulatory means to reverse it any faster back then, and it took many years to create the regulations, then more time for them to have an effect. While many of those regulations were stripped away over time, the basics created back then were still in place, because they benefited everyone- the speculators and the working guys equally.
Mistakes were made then and now. That is a given in a democracy. We avoided all the lethal mistakes this time, and while our safety net was fragile, enough of it held to keep us from falling to the depths that could have drowned us all.
All you have to do is look at Greece to see how bad it could have been. And unlike Greece, which had most of continent to prop it's economy up, we have no one but ourselves. We really don't know how far down we would have to go before we became a Greece. We never will know, either, because we are a different people, but the longer we sit in the mud and look backward, the longer it will take to get back on our feet and move forward again.
The choice is always ours. It always takes guts and faith to make any big change in our society, and we have to look as much to the common good mopre than to our own individual good for them to happen.
The health care act is not perfect, but will do a lot to alleviate the out of control problems that affect 1/6th of our economy, and the one part of our economy that affects us all equally- good affordable medicine is literally a life and death matter to us all. It is to our common good to have a fully healthy society, and hoping that this will come with no upset is foolish. It had to be done. Now that we have a law to do it for the first time, we will eventually find ways to make the law better and ways to make it more efficient. This is always easier than it is to start from scratch, even in the worst of times.
Trying to look back is as foolish, and believing that we only have to save and never spend is the most foolish of all. Like it or not, we all depend on each other more than any of us will ever realize.
Last edited by banjomike; 07-03-2012 at 12:09 PM..
Time for some perspective, Taratova.
Are things worse now than in 2009? No. They are better.
Will the total cost of your health care go up? No. It will go down. By 2016, you will see.
Are foreclosures increasing? No. In fact, new home construction is up this year.
Are we sliding into a depression? No. We are slowly emerging from one.
And your thoughts about Obama being stupid is just your panicky mind at work. He's still the smartest guy in the room, like it or not.
Premiums have already been going up fast due to it, who are you kidding, yourself?
Is the country better off with 5.5 Trillion and counting in new debt since 2009?
Will rates go down...are you sure?
What if you have a cadillac insurance plan that will get heavily taxed starting in 2018?
Things actually showed improvement in January 2009...Obama didn't have a hand in that...why is the recovery so tepid?
And what improvement was there in January 2009?
Ken
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