Chris shared several charts in tonight's opening segment that I don't think we already have on the blog so I've rounded them up here along with their source links.
Kaiser Foundation: Medicare solvency projections
ABC NEWS/WASHINGTON POST POLL: Fiscal Cliff (pdf)
Poll Shows Public Wants Entitlements Left Untouched
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So what I was thinking was that what if the biggest benefit from legalizing pot was that future people who think about smoking nicotine will, when comparing the two, go with the pot and the hospitals won't be full of people dying from emphysima (easy for you to spell).
Let's blame France for not legalizeing weed first and using it for paper (in leiu of tree pulp) and in place of cotton for cloth goods,, thereby reduceing herbacides, pestacides, and ferlizer poisons..
Leave it up to Colorado.
N.B.: When I'm unsure about how to spell something, I go to Google, type in something that looks about right to me, and it leads me to the correct spelling of the word. Or you can do the same at dictionary.com. Takes just a few seconds and makes me look way smarter than I am. ;-)
Perhaps it requires delving into the legislative history to find what changes were made in, say, 1974, '98-99, etc, but huh? Why the hugediscrepancies in YTI (years to insolvency) from one year (or short span of years) to another? I can't believe it's driven by major changes in utilization--people pretty much get sick and use the hospital, and I don't think it goes in waves that big. I particularly don't see the correlation in Bush II's first term. The only major change I remember was the tax cuts, and there wasn't a huge accompanying growth in employment. A decline, in fact, as I recall. Incomes for the 1% skyrocketed, but it didn't trickle down, and that small a constituency earning that much more money wasn't going to do anything to stuff the Medicare slush fund. So what gives? Why the huge booms in 1975, and particularly 2000-2003? And why such huge drops in other years, including '04-07, before the big crash? The increases in projected solvency don't seem to correlate with anything other than Republicans in the White House (and I'm having trouble seeing how that relates).
There are a few things that affect the years to insolvency:
*change in the ratio of workers to retirees. As people live longer and have fewer children, the system is under greater strain. If nothing else changed, this would be seen as a negative slope in the bar graph.
*change in the medicare tax rate and tax cap. More income has been subject to medicare taxes, and at higher rates, in the 70's and 80's. This causes positive slopes from the time of the change. The Reagan administration did this in spades.
* change in the employment rate. Attaining full or near full employment causes more employees to have wages, and more to have higher wages. Again, positive changes in the slope (such as during '98-'02).
* change in services covered by medicare. Medicare part D offered an expensive expansion of services WITHOUT raising taxes to pay for it. A very significant negative change in slope from 2003 on.
The reality is that as long as life expectancy increases, medicare will never be secure in the long term and will have to be rejiggered every decade or so. This is because the ratio of workers to retirees will keep changing.
The change in the years to insolvency goes to the actions on medicare and prescription drugs by the Repubs in 2004 which gave huge subsidies to the insurance companies to provide medicare advantage, said that medicare could NOT negotiate the prices of prescription drugs with the pharmaseutical companies, increased the payout to the providers, and maintained the fee for service approach. All this added up to the well-publicized $716 billion added to the cost of medicare. Obamacare is doing much to increase the number of years to insolvency because it is paying for quality of medical care instead of quantity and going after medicare fraud.
I'd love to provide a link to this piece for my friends on Facebook, but I've been noticing that links posted there from the Rachel Maddow Show display a generic description of the show only. No description of the segment, not even a title of the segment, much less an image from it. I've been noticing this for a while as other friends post things from the show, but they keep getting this generic link. This is in contrast to links from the Rachel Maddow Blog, and some other shows on MSNBC, like Mr. O'Donnell's show (examples of both of these appeared on my FB news feed within the last 24 hours). For folks who have busy lives, we don't all have time to click on every link posted, we need some kind of context. Is there some way to fix this?
Once the professonal analysis is done by the committee of 15, it should become more solvent. I know that just the duplicate tests that they keep giving to seniors will drop, that alone will save a lot of money. They need to transfer all medical records in one centralized location so that they're not running duplicate tests on the same patient. It would be nice if they would stop relying on the patients testimony solely, patients can't tell the doctors what they think may be the problem, the doctors should have all those answers available to the patient. There are too many Doctors who just want to give the patient a pill and then be done. Doctors need to behave like Doctor's even if they get the diagnosis wrong the first time.Most of them are now considered pill pushers.The American people are not guinea pigs, I think they try all their new drugs out on elderly patients, that's gotta stop. Patients before profit should be the golden rule of medicine. Malpractice lawyers need to back off for a while until the medical industry is fixed.
The public has already had its say last month. They elected a Republican House of Representatives which will go to the wall (including default on our debts) to implement the Ryan plan.
The public's next opportunity to have any input won't be for another 22 months. In the meantime, polls are meaningless.
Your statement about the "public" electing a republican House needs some explanation. The total number of Democratic votes for House members exceeded the votes for republicans by several million. The only thing that got the republicans elected was their ability to game play in drawing district lines. If we were on a system where the people who got the most votes got the position, then both the House and the Senate would be solidly Democratic.
It's too bad that most people either can't or won't take the time to think about charts like the one at the top and consider its meaning. It's empirical evidence that Medicare is not "going off the rails" or "draining the nation's coffers." Instead, they listen to pedagogical nonsense from politicians and get their shorts in a knot.
I say this argues for a better educated populace if we expect our form of government to succeed into the future. Just a thought.
But OGN, Medicare and Welfare and inner-city Nikes are desploding our debt and I'm not really paying for anything but lip-service.
TLA,
Scott, the retard..
I notice there were increases in the solvency under Carter, Clinton and Obama.
D.C.Sessions: The Republicans maintained a majority in the House because of the gerrymandering of various states around the nation. Have you looked at some of the ridiculous size of some of these?
They did not get the most votes overall. Check up on your facts, why don't you?
http://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/usa-inc-key-points