Health care costs—the lie

Spiraling health care costs.  We've heard it so often it's burned in our national soul.  But 100 years ago, health care was 5% of consumer income, and today it is 6%.  Entertainment has soared as a percent of income, as has transportation.  Where's the outrage? Food has dropped from 40% of consumer income to 15%, and if you cut eating out, it would drop even more. If a pill costs $100/week instead of pennies like an aspirin (which won't keep us alive), we are outraged, but don't consider the 10 years of research and FDA approvals and the recovery costs.  We want the best when we go to the hospital for surgery or illness, but we want someone else to pay the bill and seem to want the RNs and doctors, cooks and janitors to work for free.

What has increased is the amount of government in our health care, not just in research, but in expensive, ever growing regulation of the insurance industry (they are now same species partners), plus creating a new bureaucracy and red tape that steps between us and our doctors.  And now despite the soaring graft, payola and crime in Medicare, Medicaid, VA, S-CHIP, state programs and insurance companies, Obama wants an even fatter layer of government, plus he wants the IRS which is embroiled in its own scandal supervising it. (Can't wait for the IRS, NSA, our electronic medical record and the i-phone fingerprint to all be linked.) Whether or not the ACA was designed it to crash the economy is no longer the issue; that is what has resulted as we’re still struggling with Obama’s recovery.