Financial Tyranny: "We The People" Are The New Permanent Underclass In America

Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

Americans can no longer afford to get sick and there’s a reason why.

That’s because a growing number of Americans are struggling to stretch their dollars far enough to pay their bills, get out of debt and ensure that if and when an illness arises, it doesn’t bankrupt them.

This is a reality that no amount of partisan political bickering can deny.

Many Americans can no longer afford health insurance, drug costs or hospital bills. They can’t afford to pay rising healthcare premiums, out-of-pocket deductibles and prescription drug bills.

They can’t afford to live, and now they can’t afford to get sick or die, either.

It’s a gamble any way you look at it, and the medical community is not helping.

Healthcare costs are rising, driven by a medical, insurance and pharmaceutical industry that are getting rich off the sick and dying.

Appallingly, Americans spend more than any developed country on healthcare and have less to show for it. While Obamacare (a.k.a. the Affordable Care Act) may have made health insurance more accessible to greater numbers of individuals, it has failed to make healthcare any more affordable.

Indeed, health care in America has become just another way of making corporations rich at consumer expense.

This is how the middle classes, who fuel the nation’s economy and fund the government’s programs, get screwed repeatedly.

We’re living a financial nightmare.

We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

If you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the government’s claims on your property and your money, you’re not free.

Consider: The government can seize your home and your car (which you’ve bought and paid for) over nonpayment of taxes. Government agents can freeze and seize your bank accounts and other valuables if they merely “suspect” wrongdoing. And the IRS insists on getting the first cut of your salary to pay for government programs over which you have no say.

Unsurprisingly, the government has used its tax powers under the 16^th Amendment to the Constitution to advance its own imperialistic agendas and the courts have repeatedly upheld the government’s power to penalize or jail those who refused to pay their taxes.

All the while the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little thought for the plight of its citizens.

If Americans managed their personal finances the way the government mismanages the nation’s finances, we’d all be in debtors’ prison by now.

Still, the government remains unrepentant, unfazed and undeterred in its money grabs.

While we’re struggling to get by, the police state is spending our hard-earned tax dollars to further entrench its powers and entrap its citizens.

For instance, American taxpayers have been forced to shell out $5.6 trillion since 9/11 for the military industrial complex’s costly, endless so-called “war on terrorism.” The 16-year war in Afghanistan, which now stands as the longest and one of the most expensive wars in U.S. history, is about to get even longer and more costly, thanks to President Trump’s promise to send more troops over.

In this way, the military industrial complex will get even richer, and the American taxpayer will be forced to shell out even more funds for programs that do little to enhance our lives, ensure our happiness and well-being, or secure our freedoms.

This is no way of life.

Yet it’s not just the government’s endless wars that are bleeding us dry.

We’re also being forced to shell out money for surveillance systems to track our movements, money to further militarize our already militarized police, money to allow the government to raid our homes and bank accounts, money to fund schools where our kids learn nothing about freedom and everything about how to comply, and on and on.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The government isn’t taking our money to make our lives better. Just take a look at the nation’s failing infrastructure, and you’ll see how little is being spent on programs that advance the common good.

We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.

This is nothing less than financial tyranny.

“We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.

It’s tempting to say that there’s little we can do about it, except that’s not quite accurate.

There are a few things we can do (demand transparency, reject cronyism and graft, insist on fair pricing and honest accounting methods, call a halt to incentive-driven government programs that prioritize profits over people), but it will require that “we the people” stop playing politics and stand united against the politicians and corporate interests who have turned our government and economy into a pay-to-play exercise in fascism.

We’ve become so invested in identity politics that label us based on our political leanings that we’ve lost sight of the one label that unites us: we’re all Americans.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the powers-that-be want to pit us against one another. They want us to adopt an “us versus them” mindset that keeps us powerless and divided. Trust me, the only “us versus them” that matters anymore is “we the people” against the police state.

We’re all in the same boat, folks, and there’s only one real life preserver: that’s the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

The Constitution starts with those three powerful words: “We the people.”

The message is this: there is power in our numbers.

That remains our greatest strength in the face of a governmental elite that continues to ride roughshod over the populace. It remains our greatest defense against a government that has claimed for itself unlimited power over the purse (taxpayer funds) and the sword (military might). As Patrick Henry declared in the last speech before his death, “United we stand, divided we fall.”

This holds true whether you’re talking about health care, war spending, or the American police state.

New Study Finds U.S. Healthcare System Ranks Dead Last Compared To Other Developed Nations

As Republicans sit on the precipice of fumbling what will likely be their one opportunity to repeal and replace America"s failed Obamacare experiment, a new study just released by The Commonwealth Fund found that the U.S., despite spending more money per capita than any other country on the planet, has the worst healthcare system in the developed world.

The Commonwealth Fund focused on evaluating five main areas of the healthcare system, including care process, access, administrative efficiency, equity and health care outcomes and analyzed 72 indicators within those fields.  Of the 11 countries included in the study, the U.S. ranked dead last by a fairly staggering margin.

The United States spends far more on health care than other high-income countries, with spending levels that rose continuously over the past three decades (Exhibit 1). Yet the U.S. population has poorer health than other countries.

Timely and accessible health care could mitigate many of these challenges, but the U.S. health care system falls short, failing to deliver indicated services reliably to all who could benefit. In particular, poor access to primary care has contributed to inadequate prevention and management of chronic diseases, delayed diagnoses, incomplete adherence to treatments, wasteful overuse of drugs and technologies, and coordination and safety problems.

Even worse, aside from "care process," which tracks metrics related to preventative care and consistent engagement with the same family doctor over long periods of time, the U.S. scored last (or thereabouts) in every single category of the study.

Adding insult to injury, these poor results come despite the fact that America spends roughly 60% more on healthcare, as a percentage of GDP, than the other countries in the study...

...a metric that will only get worse when the study is updated again in 3 years as we"ve recently shown that healthcare premiums have surge roughly 100% since 2013 (note that the cost portion of this latest study ended with data collected in 2014).

Can anyone spot the outlier?

But sure, we should probably just leave everything as is...Obamacare seems to be working just fine.

"The Medical System As We Know Is Going To Blow Up... And Soon"

Authored by Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

Think of the ObamaCare reform debate now playing in the US Senate as the final gurglings of polity that knows it is whirling around the drain. They’re pretending to attempt to fix a racket that comprises eight percent of the American economy. Yikes! How did that happen? At the beginning of the 20^th century it was one-quarter of one percent (.25 percent) of the economy.

Source: USGovernmentSpending.com

The standard explanation is that, first, Medicare jacked up overall healthcare activity in the 1960s, hauling in a customer-base of old folks who previously received no special treatment and were, generally, less well than non-old folk. Secondarily, technological innovation opened up so many new methods of disease control for everybody, young and old, that we’re able to treat more sickness in more complicated ways — and that drove costs up way further.

The greater part of the story remains neatly concealed within the matrix of rackets erected around the money-flows since the big cost bump-up in the 1960s, and these involve insurance companies, Big Pharma, corporatized doctors’ practices, hospital monopolies, and, of course, politicians on-the-take dividing amongst each other a colossal pool of grift that exists mainly for one simple reason: the cost of everything is hidden from public view.

Nobody has any idea what anything costs. Certainly not the patients, sometimes called “customers” or “consumers” — but really hostages. If you go into the hospital for a stent in the left descending coronary artery, nobody will tell you what it costs, starting with the doctors who have performed the procedure a thousand times. They can’t even estimate the cost (or won’t), though they could probably give you a pretty good ballpark number for the cost-and-installation of a new fuel pump on their BMW-28i.

Charges for medical care are never discussed with the patient. Doctors especially pretend to regard such a proposition as beneath the dignity of their profession, rather like British aristocrats regarded all questions pertaining to money in the Downton Abby scheme of things — a filthy business better left to the servants, like disposing of the table-scraps. Of course the “servants” in the hospital scheme of things are a fantastic hierarchy of dangerously overfed clerks overwhelmed by the anomie of spending countless hours typing fictitious numbers into their work stations. A more pointless life can hardly be conceived. If you ask the ones who “interface” with you at the check-out counter how your bill was toted up exactly, you will receive nothing more than a pitiless stare of contempt — which is actually aimed inward at their own existential quandaries, a pathological dynamic that perhaps deserves attention from the research funding troughs.

The cost of everything medical is worked out in a private rain-dance between the aforementioned manifold concerned parties on the basis of what they think they can get away with in any particular case. In hospitals, this is enabled by the notorious ChargeMaster system which, to put it as simply as possible, allows hospitals to just make shit up.

Any bill in congress that affects to reform the gross financial malfeasance in healthcare ought to start with the absolute requirement to publicly post the cost of everything that doctors and hospitals do, and enable the “service providers” to get paid only those publicly posted costs — obviating the lucrative rain-dance for dividing up the ransoms paid by hostage-patients who come to the “providers,” after all, in extremis. Notice that this crucial feature of the crisis is missing not only from the political debate but also from the supposedly public-interest-minded pages of The New York Times and other organs of the news media. Perhaps this facet of the problem never entered the editors’ minds — in which case you really have to ask: how dumb are they?

(The funniest claim about ObamaCare in today’s New York Times is the statement that 20 million citizens got access to health care under the so-called Affordable Care Act. Really? You mean they got health insurance policies with $8000-deductables, when they don’t even have $500 in savings to pay for car repairs? What planet do The New York Times editorial writers live on?)

The corollary questions about deconstructing the insurance armature of the health care racket, and assigning its “duties” to a “single-payer” government agency is, of course, a higher level of debate. I’m not saying it would work, even if it was modeled on one of the systems currently working elsewhere, say in France. But Americans have acquired an allergy to even thinking about that, or at least they’ve been conditioned to imagine they’re allergic by self-interested politicians. So, the current product of debate in the US Senate is just a scheme for pretending to reapportion the colossal flow of grift among the grifters.

Spare yourself the angst of even worrying about the outcome of the current healthcare debate. It’s not going to get “fixed.”

The medical system as we know it is going to blow up, and soon, just like the pension systems across the country, and the treasuries of the fifty states themselves, and the rest of the Potemkin US economy.

Healthcare: "Insurance" Now Just Means Redistribution

Authored by Gary Galles via The Mises Institute,

Americans have been fighting over health insurance reform for ages. For example, 25 years ago, in 1992, over 200 congressional health care bills were introduced.

Unfortunately, while the rhetoric has focused on insurance, such as how many would supposedly gain or lose insurance if some change was implemented, that has not been the real issue. Income redistribution has. As Henry Aaron estimated that year, implementing a comprehensive national health insurance system would redistribute more income than any single national policy then in existence.

What Is Insurance? 

How do we know insurance is not the real issue? Because claimed “reforms” violate so many principles of insurance.

Insurance is about reducing risk in the face of uncertain events. But insuring things that would happen for certain, say annual checkups, offers no risk reduction — it offers no benefits to weigh against the added costs of insurance administration that must be borne — yet such coverage is frequently mandated.

Similarly, small health care risks are cheaper to provide for from modest levels of savings, rather than bearing insurance administration costs. If one’s own resources were involved, absent government interventions, they would not be insured at all. Only when others are forced to bear much of the cost would people want insurance to cover such things.

Administrative costs are not the only issue, either. The benefits from risk-reduction through insurance would also have to outweigh the cost of the health care. This is made especially difficult by the fact that the insurance itself induces over-consumption of health care services.

However, when most health care costs are borne by third parties rather than individuals themselves, there are many margins at which those individuals will want better care (e.g., better and more specialized doctors and hospitals, more costly newer drugs, tests and treatment utilizing the latest technology, etc.), as well as more care. Since that added care need only be worth what an individual pays, net of insurance coverage, much of it is worth far less than its cost to society, further limiting what people would voluntarily cover based on the principles of insurance.

Those considerations explain why lunch insurance does not exist. You will almost certainly eat lunch, which also involves relatively small expenses, so there would be little risk reduction. And if someone else would pay most of your bill, you would order far more expensive lunches than otherwise, raising the premiums that you must be charged to pay for it. The benefits don’t justify the costs, again unless others are forced to pick up a substantial part of the tab.

Also, insurance is about risk reduction that people value more than the premium they must pay for it. Thus, voluntary market insurance would not mandate coverage of things people had virtually no risk of experiencing. Teetotalers would not willingly insure for alcoholism treatment. Those sure they would never use drugs would not insist on addiction treatment. Yet government “reforms” are full of such mandates. And a quarter-century ago, before many current mandates were in place, it was already estimated that up to one-quarter of the uninsured population traced back to such cost-increasing government-imposed coverage regulations.

The price controls reform proposals incorporate are also about income redistribution, rather than health insurance. Say that my age makes my actuarial risk six times that of my students. If, as Obamacare required, I could not be charged more than three times what they were, that does not reflect actual risks. Obamacare regulations simply force the young to subsidize the old. That rip-off of the young also explains why Obamacare threatened them with a penalty to force them to accept that bad "insurance" deal.

The mandate that insurance cover pre-existing conditions shows even more clearly that “reforms” were not really about insurance. Rather than pooling those with similar circumstances and risks, allowing the law of large numbers to reduce people’s exposure, it forces others to subsidize those who are already sick, while misdirecting their blame from government requirements to insurance companies who must charge others more to pay for them. Those sorts of after-the-fact possibilities are not offered in fire, automobile or life insurance. Similarly, casinos don’t let you bet once the roulette ball has stopped or the dice are still. Only government mandates can create such windfalls through health insurance. 

In addition, if health insurance reform truly aimed to benefit all Americans — rather than benefiting some by the intentional pick-pocketing of others — it would not have been “marketed” with so many lies, damned lies and statistics (See my article “Comparing Obamacare scams.”). Honesty would have sufficed if reform did what was being promised.

The health insurance debate has been so contentious in part because it has allowed massive income redistribution to be misrepresented as about overcoming market failures in health insurance. It helped sell Obamacare dishonestly and now portrays reducing massive theft from government targets as imposing heartless harm on others. Such misrepresentation may be able to produce misinformed political support, but it cannot generate policies that advance Americans’ general welfare.