the 'fiscal cliff' compromise is just the lastest example of kicking the can down the road, rather than making than doing hard work ans facing up to the big problems...

It is not only that there is no will to make the necessary changes to fix things; there is tremendous incentive to actively grow the predatory system.

I don't have a subscription so can't comment. It's a good article on our healthcare system's madness, but the credibility is damaged and the reader derailed when the author says January 2012 in the intro rather than January 2013. I know reporters don't have a lot staff anymore and we all make errors like that, but if it's "journalism," then they shouldn't have such a confusing typo.

Thanks for the article, xchrom.

...not by me:

scmike1965

January 04, 2013 12:00pm

Welcome to America January 2012
Editors beware it is now

2013.

America is a declining empire.

Research is ongoing in warm superconductivity, a liquid nitrogen temp superconductor would change the whole economics of a lot of high tech gear.

http://www.nature.com/news/tantalizing-hints-of-room-temperature-superconductivity-1.11443

I believe that they use niobium tin and liquid helium cooling.

Problems are that the material needs to stay superconducting in the presence of high current and high magnetic field and that it has to be strong and ductil to sustain the high mechanical forces without cracking and collapsing.

I know superconductors aren't quite there yet but I think there's a good chance they will be developed sufficiently, there's certainly plenty of economic incentive to drive the effort.

Technology prediction is a tricky business of course.

refer to this as the Medical Industrial Complex which learned it's tactics from the Military Industrial Complex. I do my best to avoid using any of its products or services. You can tell when you're getting shafted when the gatekeepers are more concerned about being paid or paying out a dime than whether or not the patient receives any care at all. Hippocratic oath has become hypocritic oath.... For those who need a significant amount of care, I feel for you.

Yes, we could go to a single payer system and save 1.5T$ per year, eradicating our debt in a decade.

But, it would put a million persons out of work in one fell swoop. That's a lot of people not eating.

We'd need cooperation. Get that from stupid ignorant Republicans and from the stupid greedy Republicans, and we'll get it done.

with all the local/state/national staffing needs that implies.

The other main $ problem is caused by not negotiating with Big Pharma for prescription drug bulk buys at rock bottom rates. If we did that it would lower healthcare costs without firing a single person.

Those are only 2 of the many ways single payer would improve the employment picture as well as the economy. I'm sure there are many more.

Where do you get the idea that millions would be unemployed because of it? That just doesn't make sense to me.

You can't just take a bunch of billing coders and switch them like a light switch to taking blood pressures, blood samples and reading labs results.

The coders fighting insurance companies, the insurance company code readers fighting hospitals, they're unneeded. With the 24/7 guards collecting insurance cards as you walk in, also unneeded, and the profit takers we have 2/3 of our health care dollars going to things we don't need.

$8200 per year which is 2.5T$ per year. Instead of, you know, SOCIALISM, single-payer, which costs:
$3000 per year which is 1.0T$ per year. Which means we spend the remainder:
$5000 per year which is 1.5T$ per year on card guards, billing armies and PROFITS for the rich which is the health care denial industry. A one-and-a-half trillion dollar industry. Two thirds of our health care spending.

1.5T$, that's a lot of people who will lose their jobs if we switch in a minute to single payer. A trillion dollars could be a million people making a million dollars a year. Yeah, that's a lot of people, more than a million.

for clinic workers, the construction crews to build the clinics. Need for coders will shrink because better software systems will replace them, but actual caregivers would be needed by the thousands. Govermment administrators to run the new programs would be needed... And while we can't switch in a minute, (who said we would?) a simple line in the Medicare law "all citizens and legal residents are eligible" added would make it possible. Pay for it with savings from obsolete Pentagon programs or a new transaction tax on Wall Street. This can be done, because EVERY OTHER COUNTRY ON EARTH IS ALREADY BUSY DOING IT FOR MANY DECADES--and we are already doing it now with the VA and Medicare. It's just a political problem of redistribution of funds.

god, festivito--you are so wrong! It will take years, but it will save the economy! It must be done!

You say I am so wrong!? And, you do that between a paragraph and a sentence that admits that you missed I was right?

I defy you to point to even one sentence from this thread where I was wrong.

The OP wants to reduce the debt. You switch that to saving the economy. I don't know why. Lopping 1.5T$ off our GDP will not make our economy look good, or be good. And, you admit it will take time to transition those jobs so it will not too quickly lop that 1.5T$.

In order to make that transition we need that cooperation I spoke of before.

Keeping Medicare as is is such a self defeating debate. We just go to the larger problem, a crazy health care system.

The pressure to cut it is overwhelming in DC, it's really only a matter of time.

All that lovely money going to so many undeserving non-wealthy people is giving the 1% a sad.