Category: Political

I am a chameleon. I will adapt and change according to my environment. If you vote for politicians that devalue my hard-earned money to solve our problems then I will move my money into hard assets. If you vote to increase taxes on the highest earners then I will simply work less and decrease my income. If you vote for someone who attempts to micromanage the way I practice medicine then I will simply stop working as a doctor. If you vote for people who attempt to deny me of my God-given constitutional rights then I will move as far away from you as necessary in order to preserve them. You need to understand that I am a chameleon… and I plan to always stay at least five moves ahead of you.

The French Revolution in the late 1700s had multiple causes: A widening gap between the richest and poorest classes… a significant increase in food prices… political gridlock leading to soaring budget deficits… an economic crisis exacerbated by two prolonged wars that were not paid for… and an ineffective and feckless leader that ascended to power in the middle of the country’s financial downturn. I’m sure glad that we don’t have to worry about that kind of crap happening over here.

 

1) No one can be denied homeowner’s insurance for any reason, even if their home has already been burned down or has been demolished by a tornado.

2) Everyone has to buy homeowner’s insurance for a ten bedroom mansion even if they live in an apartment or they are currently homeless. This will help offset the cost of people getting homeowner’s insurance AFTER their houses have already been destroyed.

3) The Federal Reserve would start printing an extra 80 billion dollars per month and loaning this to the federal government in order to provide subsidies for people who cannot afford to insure a mansion that they do not actually own.

4) People who already have homeowner’s insurance would be allowed to keep their current policy as long as the value of their home has not changed by more than five dollars.

5) We can spend 600 million dollars on a website with insurance exchanges available to help any people who might lose their old homeowner’s insurance. This website will crash every 20 seconds and will not retain any data.

Hello, boys and girls! It’s time for another lesson in Economics 101. Today, we are going to be talking about how insurance works.

Insurance companies actually operate on very low profit margins. They are not like oil companies that make astronomical profits. What insurance companies do in general is take all of their estimated expenditures and subtract this from the total sum of all of their premiums leaving them with usually around 4 to 6 percent profit.

When the Affordable Care Act was passed a few years ago, the law made it perfectly clear that the estimated expenditures for insurance companies would increase significantly by removing previous restrictions on who qualified for insurance. The plan to offset this was going to force the young, healthy and uninsured people into the marketplace which would then increase the sum of the premium revenue. By adding 7 million previously uninsured patients, this would allow insurance companies to maintain their narrow profit margin.

If you look at the rate of individuals signing up so far, it would appear that this will extrapolate to well under 7 million people signing up for these health care exchanges. This will immediately put the squeeze on insurance companies. If the situation does not change, insurance companies will be forced to operate at a loss or drastically increase premiums to make up a difference.

I suspect that some politicians were aware that this would happen, and had a plan to eventually restrict insurance companies by law to keep them from raising premiums. This would eventually lead to the collapse of private insurance companies and set up the government as the single payer of last resort. However, things changed drastically in 2010 when the Republican Party gained control of the House. No such restrictions are likely to be placed on insurance companies for the near future.

If the President does not do something soon to get millions of healthy people into the system, the premiums on everyone’s insurance will start to dramatically increase. Insurance companies will have no choice in the matter. They will either have to increase premiums or stop making profit. The President will likely start accusing the insurance companies of being greedy because of this rise in premiums, but make no mistake about it… the Affordable Care Act will be the direct cause of everyone’s premiums going up.

The “Affordable Care Act” is not only a misnomer but it’s a ticking time bomb… and it is about to go “boom”.

The key to understanding the economic problems going in the United States today is based on a economic concept known as “”price discovery”. This is defined as the process of determining the price of an asset in the marketplace through the interactions of buyers and sellers. If you want to cure the United States of the economic cancer that is destroying it from within, you have to focus on the root of the problem. Our government is regularly engaged in activity that distorts the process of natural price discovery. They throw money into housing which falsely inflates home prices. They pour money into higher education which distorts the cost of a college education making it more unaffordable to the masses. They pour money into our bond market to drive down interest rates. They funnel money into medical care which distorts and destroys true price discovery and makes our health system the most expensive in the world. Then after all of this, we have idiots like Congressman Jim McDermott come along and recommend more market manipulation by trying to set limits on the cost of certain medical procedures in order to help bring down health care costs. Okay Congress, you want to figure out why the price of everything including health care continues to skyrocket? I suggest that you take Michael Jackson’s advice and look at the “Man in the Mirror”. My fear is that the majority of Americans will not understand what has been done to our economy until it is too late.

The United States is like Michael Jackson. When we were young, we were something the likes of which the world had never seen. As our popularity grew, our wealth and success grew exponentially. It appeared that we could do no wrong. Over time we began to change. Watergate was like our early plastic surgery, it started to make us look flawed. 9/11 was like our Pepsi commercial explosion, it exposed our vulnerabilities. Over time, our revenue went down but we continued to spend like we were on top of the world. We would waste money on any whim. We treated our wealth as if it would always be in endless supply. As our debt exploded, we kept telling ourselves that we could grow our way out of it if we could just have another hit and get back on top. The child molestation scandal was like the Clinton and Bush years, our morals came into question and some people may have been violated behind closed doors. Now we are just a shadow of our former selves but we can’t even see it. We just seem really tired and frail. With the recent reelection of Barack Obama… it felt like we just took a big dose of propofol and tried to get a good night of rest.