Obama’s Harvard educated father was an economist. Kenya is ranked 184th in GDP.

Apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree!

Medicare expenditures represented 0.7 percent of GDP in 1970 and had grown to 2.7 percent of GDP by 2005. reflecting rapid increases in the factors affecting health care cost growth, as mentioned previously.
Continuing rapid growth is expected thereafter, with total Medicare expenditures projected to reach about 11.3 percent of GDP by 2080. For comparison, projected Medicare costs would exceed those for Social Security in 2028 and would continue to grow more rapidly until, in 2081, the expenditure level for Medicare would be 80 percent more than that for Social Security. Another comparison would be that over the last 50 years, total Federal income tax receipts have averaged 11 percent of GDP.

I like the fact that Medicare can actually overtake social security in its scope and size.

The US is pretty much the only large country in the world that doesn’t provide some healthcare through the government. And private companies are saying that it’s the private healthcare costs that make the US uncompetitive with other countries.

It’s time to nationalize healthcare. (And by the way, allow safe drugs to be imported from other nations and allow the US goverment to directly negotiate with the pharma companies on drug prices for US programs). It could end up saving US jobs.

jim m on November 12, 2008 at 4:30 PM

What do you call medicare, Medicaid, Wick, etc?

EyeSurgeon on November 12, 2008 at 2:13 PM

I haven’t read the whole thread, so I don’t know if its been pointed out or not, but the comparision of the overhead costs of Medicare/Medicaid to private institutions is sort of apples to oranges. Medicare/caid pays only labor and supplies and doesn’t have to pay for hardware/buildings/computers/parking lots/utilities etc.

He blew a gasket, he said no one, NO ONE, with the exception of the poor, uses the doctors in that that system. It would be like taking a state appointed attorney for your murder trial.

End result he pays a private health care company ON TOP of his insane taxes.

Bootleg DVDs.

You’re trying to kill the goose that laid your golden egg.

“Market forces” don’t include theft.

Seriously, get yourself an Econ 101 book.

I think we’re for telling our senior citizens that no one in this country should be denied medical care because of a lack of funds. But I think we’re against forcing all citizens, regardless of need, into a compulsory government program…

Say it again Ron!

Then how do you stop the US consumer from effectively paying for all of the worldwide R&D costs for new drugs?

jim m on November 12, 2008 at 7:17 PM

As I understand it, it is illegal to import medicines into the country because socialist nations abroad have demanded below market prices in their markets. Thus we end up paying all the R&D for new medicines. So maybe we should just reverse it:

Ban the export of medicines abroad but open the borders to medicine imports. The Pharma Co’s will almost immediately drop their R&D programs and prices on existing drugs will decline domestically.

Sometimes you just got to let a system break before things get better.

Read this from Hot Air, then get ready to contact your representatives…

Then they immediately set out to prove you wrong!

I have no thought left to turn to except that which says that these liberals, every single one of them, are brain dead. We are paying to keep a bunch of brain-dead people on their life support systems. Too bad we were not able to pull the plugs and watch the lines go flat.

I’m scared to death and I feel completely helpless.

jewells45 on November 12, 2008 at 1:46 PM

No problemo…………. next time you need a Doctor, just go to your local Emergency Room, leave ALL ID behind, and just say,

“No habla Englis…… yo estoy “illegal alien”…. necessito medico…… (then in perfect English say) ……. and if you don’t, the ACLU, La Raza, and ACORN will sue your ass………..”

……… ain’t this a great country?

With the Catholic Hospitals possibly closing if abortion is forced on them; the lines will stretch around the block a couple of times.

Of course the elitists will get preferential and private care of the best health care available. Those of us below elitist will just have to suck it up.

When does the fuse get lit?