As I have blogged in the past, when you find the correct answer to most complex problems, it turns out to be very simple. Rather than look the answer to Obamacare being some complex thing, it is actually very simple, but first a little background.
I was talking to a friend who had a knee replacement and is now doing very well. This person is over 70 years old. I asked, "If you had to pay for the replacement out of your own pocket, would you have had it done?" It did not take the person more than two seconds to answer, "No". On that basis, I challenged that the replacement was "not worth it". The person had to agree. This brings up the serious question about Obamacare. "If all the people, now, will be spending "government" money will we be getting our monies worth? The answer is clearly, "No". It is like the kid spending his birthday money and saving the money that he earned mowing the lawn. When it was my friends money, the knee replacement was not worth it, but if it was government money, then it was OK! See the problem that we face with Obamacare?
When the government came out with Social Security to help older people, it caused younger people to stop saving for their old age. If they were going to get a free ride on Social Security, what was the point of setting aside savings for the future? This is the way human nature works.
I know people who belong to teachers unions who have fat retirement programs. They spend all their money now and save very little for the future because they know their union retirement program is going to take care of them. That is just one of the reasons that the USA now has one of the lowest savings rates in the world. Further, we are falling fast in terms of personal net worth. Our median net worth per family ranks no better than about 12th in the world. On that basis, I would not call us "rich.
Look at our rate of home ownership. Most people who do not know the facts think that we have one of the highest home ownership rates in the world, but that is not true. We are about 10th. This after all the government efforts to make it easier and easier to own a home. Think about it!
This is a repeat, but we now spend about 17% of our GNP on medical. That is by far the highest in the world. For that we end up about 30th in life expectancy. With Obamacare and the facts about human nature that I have pointed out above, our spending will go up to about 23% within a few years. How do you think we will be able to pay for that? What that we have now will we not be able to afford in the future? Have you or anyone you know ever thought about that? I don't think so.
It has taken longer than I expected for an international figure to call us out on our claim to be "exceptional". Puten challenged the our claim of being exceptional in his NY Times article. He and most of the world know that we can not claim to be exceptional when our kids, the next generation, rank 28th in the world in math. We can't start catching up until we stop going down and I do not see that point in the near future.
What Obamacare is going to do is to accelerate our decline. We will not get healthier or have any better quality of life. We are just going get poorer and poorer until we will be expecting some other country to send us "foreign aid" like we did for them. To that we will get the same response that we have gotten to stop Syria from using poison gas and you know what that was!
