Per Capita Spending Almost Doubled Since 2000...wow!

greedy thinking like this is what is ruining thins country... if your living a great life making mega $$$, pay your Social Security tax for every dollar you earn like the rest of us, don't be so greedy, help the disabled and elderly

the benefits should be caped.. not the tax....

sadly republicans would rather throw the elderly of the next generation out in the street then do what is right it seems

I pay for unemployment insurance too, hope I never need it and if I never do, I will not (*)(*)(*)(*)(*) about paying for the insurance like republicans would... I would just be glad I never needed it... and be glad it's there for those that do need it


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my income stays the same (

 

What is ruining this country is welfare thinking...a sense of entitlement...a sense of equality when it has not been earned.

FICA is a payroll withholding...not a tax. If it was a tax it would apply to everyone equally...and it does not.

FICA withholding is meant to fund one's own retirement account...not the disabled and elderly.

FICA has nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats.

 

fica is a tax.. you can't will off that to someone else if you die at 40 years old, so it is a tax, it pays for insurance that when you get old.. if you need it.. social security will be there

bill gates doesn't need a cap on his taxes.. only the right things people should pay less taxes the more they earn... as if the earning more was not reward enough

welfare abuse is hurting America as much as the greed by the rich... we need both, but drop the abuse and greed of each.. bill gates doesn't need a social security check, only the right thinks he does

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We can no longer have a discussion when you don't know the difference between a payroll withholding and a tax.

And...if you and others want more in life, instead of blaming your problems on the wealthy, why not adopt a novel idea and go out and earn your 'own' pile of money...

 

I probably make more then you... unlike you I do not feel I need to be rewarded with huge tax cuts for making lots of money, the making lots of money *IS* the reward

 

The other 24 million are survivors or disabled.
You really think it makes sense to see if disabled people are making so much money that not paying some of them a social security disability payment would save a lot of money?

 

And surely your Johnson is much bigger just like your income...

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I believe all 24 million should be means tested...yes.
Many of them are collecting disability while still working or not truly being disabled.
Of course this will never be done because pissing away billion$ is the American way of doing things...

 

Before you go about inventing a vast new new money and time wasting bureaucratic nightmare for the disabled, who have already jumped through numerous hoops to get the benefits in the first place you should consider that it has already been done:

There was a big stink about disabled benefits for the unemployable in Washington state some years ago so the government appointed the person who was leading the charge against the lazy disability cheaters, someone just like you, to the job of getting these so-called unemployable people off of disability and back to work.

After two years of concentrated effort she reported to the legislature that in every single one of the hundreds of cases she personally investigated she found that the person really was disabled and had no other source of income and really was unemployable. She apologized for wasting everyone's time and money and for being so ignorant about the disabled Then she resigned and recommended that her position be abolished.

And you want to try that again?

 

They are "truly disabled" , that is a requirement for collecting.
I seriously doubt that means testing would save as much as it would cost.

 

does it matter, would it change the facts, nope, facts are the same regardless...

 

Perhaps you have not seen the 60 Minutes reports on your 'truly disabled'?

I personally know people who collect disability who if means-tested would fail the test.

Read the recent reports on how much Medicare is wasting paying doctors tens of millions per year.

IMO the entire federal government is grossly inefficient, wasting billion$, and the bigger the federal government becomes the bigger the fraud amounts become. When a business is hemorrhaging money and can't increase income, they look at every single possible reduction in expenses...no one is allowed to proclaim 'I seriously doubt that means testing would save as much as it would cost'. You've got a federal government spending $3.9 trillion this year and if we have 10% inefficiency this is wasting $390 billion per year! If it's 20% then we're wasting $780 billion per year! At what point do you believe it's time to review government waste?

 

Facts are only a representation of the past and a glimpse of the present...and are therefore subject to change any time in the future.

Most of the so-called 'facts' today are politically motivated and twisted in order to garner votes.

For those who are not physically and/or mentally de-capacitated, if they want more in life, then it requires action from them to achieve more in life...

 

I would start with the Defence Department, which is completely unable to account for hundreds of $Billions of spending over the last few years. They were unable to find enough bullets for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan despite having over $6Billion worth of the exact ammunition they needed stockpiled all over the world. They simply could not find it. They do not know where their money is going or where the things they buy end up.

There is certainly a lot of waste in the government but the republican party has been particularly enamoured of privatizing government services and extremely hostile to funding the agencies that root out waste and fraud in government for the last few decades despite their rhetoric. They continually rant and rave about waste in government spending but when it comes down to the nitty gritty of appropriations they have continually produced and fought for budgets with draconian cuts to oversight and audit agencies within the government.

The result is government agencies unable to oversee contractors and the government's own auditing services so severely understaffed due to budget cuts that they have been forced to increase audit cycles for government agencies from every 2-3 years to every 7-8 years or longer. The Defence Department has never been successfully audited. The last time they tried the auditors were unable to account for over $500Billion in Defence Department spending between 2003 and 2008. This is regular spending, not black programs.

Fraud against the government is rampant because the Justice Department has the resources and personnel to investigate less than 0.1% and prosecute less than 5% of the hundreds of allegations of fraud both within and against the government it receives every day. Meanwhile it is continually assailed by politicians to direct its limited resources to whatever the politically motivated activity of the day is.

Anyway, most people on disability are not getting their money from the Federal government but from state and local governments and private companies whose standards and oversight are, for the most part, far less rigorous.

 

So what?
If you think that disabled people should get some money, guess what, some people will fake being disabled to get money, it happens.
That's why government run health care is so efficient, it takes the profit motive out of medicine, which reduces the cost by half.

 

Its more about economies of scale. Also government run health care, given the median voter and their tendency towards supporting tax cuts, can lead to underinvestment.

 

It becomes a political question, and the answer comes at the polls.
But with the profit motive removed, quality health care costs a lot less.

 

But its not about the profit motive directly, but how the profit motive is associated with a splintered system that cannot fully exploit economies of scale

 

Markets work when greed and fear have free rein, greed balances fear, and the result approximates the ideal.
But when you remove one, the other wreaks havoc.
In our health care system we have reduced greed on one side and reduced fear on the other, the result is the highest cost health care in the world, and not the best health care in the world. Modern Health Care is not something that is not suited for a market, it functions much better as a government service.

 

Not the case. For example, markets are an integral part of feasible socialism.

The comparison with other systems, where through 'input-output' analysis shows greater efficiency, is focused on economies of scale.

 

The basic problem with the US health care system is that it does not operate on market principles. It is a series of quasi-cartels that each control some sector of the system and negotiate in secrecy to fix the amount of money that they will squeeze from the economy. Its operation has nothing to do with the usual market facility of supply and demand and a public forum for price discovery.

The only actual market activity in the entire US health care industry is the government operated insurance exchanges, which is like going to a fish market where the wholesale prices of everything concerning seafood are totally secret, operated by a mafia that decides everything, which determines the high price in retail markets where consumers go to buy fish.

If the markets where fisherman sold their fish and fish processors sold the finished product were as public as the fish market prices would begin to reflect supply chain costs as well as supply and demand. US health care needs to move in this direction if it has any hope of avoiding a government takeover.

Wholesale public exchanges for health care provision can change the model of health care in the US and reduce expenses dramatically. They will force providers to compete for insurers money on an open market by making them offer per-patient, per-procedure pricing or global care prices. They will be forced to compete on price as well as quality of care.

 

Markets work when there is greed the desire to move forward and acquire, balanced by the inhibitions caused by fear of losing a better deal.
There are some markets that work great, others not so good.

Government health services rely on salaried personnel handling the issues that arise, and they do a pretty good job.
Private "fee for procedure" health care produces lots of procedures, because that's what people get paid for, and they do a pretty good job, but they charge twice as much, and drugs cost a lot more, because everyone is looking to make big profits, by charging insurance companies a fortune, there is no consumer saying no.

 

Sounds like a corrupted view of the invisible hand to me. Markets merely require rationality. Reference to greed is a red herring. Its also strange to suggest 'markets work when', given self-interest is behind market failure such as negative externalities.

There isn't a response to the point made here. The efficiency analysis is delivered by techniques such as DEA and stochastic frontier. The gain is from economies of scale. Personnel within NHS are often a problem. See, for example, Britain's NHS and the inefficiencies generated by non-accountable management

 

Markets work when there are many buyers, many sellers, low barriers to entry and exit, and knowledge of conditions among buyers and sellers.
Markets don't work if there are few buyers or few sellers, or high barriers to entry and exit.
Those factors distort the market.
Greed is the driver, Fear the inhibitor, that's what rational, weighing the ratio between greed and fear to reach a decision.

 

This is just reference to perfect competition. Its not particularly relevant to actual markets. Take many sellers. Schumpeterian creative destruction and networking effects show otherwise.

In terms of greed, the reference is to asymmetric information (not the Econ 101 assumptions that you've referred to). Those issues are just as relevant to national health care, given 'influence costs' and 'agency costs' (the twin problems created by asymmetric information) impact on management of hospitals