On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 5:41 AM,
dsummersmi...@comcast.netdsummersmi...@comcast.net wrote:
3) The majority of the elderly, who are on government health care, oppose
government interference in health care.
Nicely stated.
5) Folks don't want government interfering with their private employer
health care.
Right, including government interfering by removing the government
interfering tax subsidy for employer plans. Ironically, I think there
would be less resistance to adding an equivalent tax subsidy for all
non-employer plans, which of course is financially equivalent to
removing the employer-plan subsidy.
Therefore, I conclude that folks want health care costs contained without
doing anything that might possibly affect them in order to contain costs.
I agree, and I think the main cause of this attitude is that most
people are spending other people's money.
I am now leaning towards the opinion that we will face this problem only
after Medicare requires a 500 billion/year payment from the government
after its funds are exhausted.
At some point, the younger generations are going to balk at sending
over half their income to the older generations. Demographics for the
next 40 years can be easily and accurately predicted (assuming no
large immigration changes). See for example:
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/08/us-population-distribution-by-age-1950.html
Clearly the ratio of under-65 to over-65 is undergoing a drastic
change. The uncertainty comes in at what point the younger generations
will balk at paying most of their income for the older generations.
I agree that a political solution is unlikely. Already, ObamaCare is
looking like less than 50% to pass, and if it does pass, it will
probably not have any meaningful changes.
I wonder if more consumer-driven health care might slip in without an
explicit government reform, similarly to how many pension plans
changed from defined benefit to defined contribution over the past
several decades. Perhaps more employers will switch to plans like
Whole Foods, with HSAs and higher deductibles. That is still some way
from true consumer-driven health care, but the Whole Foods employees
do vote on their benefits, so there is some small amount of consumer
choice. And most surveys of highly-rated places to work that I have
seen put Whole Foods high on the list.
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