[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvHPTq3L4Y4[/youtube] David Goldhill is President and CEO of the Game Show Network and has run numerous businesses during his career. When his father died of a hospital-borne infection two years ago he began researching the entire U.S. health care system, analyzing it with the keen eye of a businessman. What he learned is that intermediaries like insurance companies, Medicare and Medicaid distort a system that is supposed to provide health care to individuals into one that serves faceless and, largely, uncaring bureaucracies. Case in point: 100,000 people die every year in America …
Obamacare: Day Three of Senate Finance Committee Hearings On Thursday, September 24th, the Senate Finance Committee continued to vote on amendments to the “Chairman’s Mark” of the America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009. As the committee continues to consider more than 500 amendments, it is becoming clear that Senators are directly undercutting the high profile promises that President Obama made to the American people in his widely broadcasted address to Congress on September 9, 2009. Consider several health policy decisions made by members of the Senate Finance Committee: Cutting Medicare …
Two days into the new Congress, the majority has signaled they are unlikely to take their promise of fiscal discipline seriously. House democrats have turned off the Medicare trigger under the rules package for the 111th Congress, which means they are unlikely to even debate entitlement policy, let alone engage in necessary reforms. The
In a body known for intemperate remarks and fabricated figures, Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) put in a worthy nominee for top honors in 2008 recently when he said: … the unfunded cost of the McCain-Bush tax cuts is more than $100 trillion. So if you weren’t giving away all of this money to the rich people and all of the Republicans who inherited money from their parents and never had a real job in their lives, maybe we could solve it. It would just take a third of the Bush-McCain …
Earlier this month, Anheuser-Busch was bought by the Belgian brewer InBev for $50.3 billion. As symbolic as the purchase was for American beer drinkers, the deal will have an even bigger impact on Belgium’s economy. A gross domestic product (GDP) of $378.9 billion makes Belgium the 28th-largest economy in the world. Now that’s a lot of money. But it’s only a little more than the $370.8 billion our federal government spends on Medicare alone. The U.S. spends a total $1.2 trillion on the Big Three entitlement programs ($581.4 billion on Social Security, …
Already Medicare expenditures account for 3.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Medicare Part A – the part of Medicare that pays hospital bills – is already spending more in benefits than it gets in revenues and is projected to grow by 7.4 percent on average over the next 10 years. Within the next five years, general revenue transfers are expected to constitute the largest single source of income to the Medicare program. According to USA Today, taxpayers are on the hook for a record $57.3 trillion in federal liabilities …
