Want to Stay out of Poverty? - Don't buy a House - Don't go to College - And Never Get Sick! Of course this is Sarcasm and Gallows Humor Laced with TRUTH!
Americans may soon exceed the amount of credit-card debt they racked up during the Great Recession.
The average household with credit card debt owes $16,061, up 10% from $14,546 10 years ago and $15,762 last year, according to a new analysis of Federal Reserve Bank of New York and U.S. Census Bureau data by the personal finance company NerdWallet. The amount of household credit card debt is still down from a recent high of $16,912 in 2008 at the height of the recession. The U.S. won’t hit pre-recession credit card debt levels until the end of 2019, NerdWallet’s analysis projects.
Why the growth in debt, given that many consumers should be skittish about living beyond their needs after the credit bubble of the Great Recession? The reason concerns a problem that has long dogged Americans. Median household income has grown 28% over the last 13 years, said Sean McQuay, a personal finance expert at NerdWallet, but expenses have outpaced it significantly. Case in point: Medical costs increased by 57% and food and beverage prices by 36% in that period.
For all the crap that insurers get for raising premiums, attacking insurers is the health-economics equivalent of shooting the messenger. Insurers are in the business of distributing to policyholders the cost of health care; that is, the prices that are charged by hospitals, doctors, and manufacturers for their services and products.Insurers can, and do, play a constructive role in preventing doctors from overcharging for their services. By requiring their beneficiaries to use doctors that charge less, such as what’s done in a preferred provider network, they can help keep costs down. But insurers have much less leverage with the most predatory force in our health-care system: hospital monopolies.
Because of crony deals. .
Tim Carney, a great critic of crony capitalism, recommends this short video by Matt Yglesias on Vox.com about how regulation drives up the cost of healthcare by preventing competition. The specific focus is on why doctors are protected from competition by nurse practitioners. The excuse is patient safety, but that is all it is, an excuse.
What it is really about is the American Medical Association’s political clout. And why is the AMA so rich? You guessed it: it enriches itself from monopolistic fees handed over by the government in exchange for its support. The fees are for a medical treatment coding system and the US Department of Health and Human Services blocks any competition against it.
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