After having sex with anything that moves, next on Sam's bucket list is shooting and eating a Panda.
Just saw the chart on sequester cuts. Most all of it defense and discretionary spending. Only 4% of it entitlements. FYI, defense and discretionary spending are each about 20% of the budget, entitlements are 45% of the budget. Which is for the most part our literally insane health care system.
TIME magazine devoted its entire issue last week to our healthcare system. To shorten it up for you… 60% of personal bankruptcy is from medical bills. We pay twice as much as any other civilized nation with poorer positive results. Non Profit hospitals are anything but non profit. Hospitals work from a system that bills 10 to 100 times the cost of products or service. Massive amounts of doctors own and operate high profit clinics, suppliers, and industries which they feed from the hospitals they work in. Hospitals and doctors give massive discounts to insurance companies and Medicare. They give no discounts to those who cannot afford insurance – those in most need of discounts – which brings us back to 60% bankruptcy rate for medical bills. Medicare is the only adult in the room paying for procedures plus overhead for actual cost. A single payer system cannot happen in this country because it will cause too much pain to doctors, medical suppliers and insurance companies who have about 7 lobbyists at work for each member of congress.
The answer is obvious. Deduct about $5000 a year from every pay check to put everyone on Medicare. It would end all our debt and deficit problems, everyone would be covered, employers would give everyone a $5000 a year raise for not having to pay half the health insurance bill which would mean we would all be paying as much as half the amount we do now. And like the rest of the civilized world it would work from non profit insurance policies from the same insurance companies at work now, who could shift their profits margins to supplemental plans.