Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
Op-ed by Robert Samuelson @ WashingtonPost.com, July 23
[....] we cannot discuss health care in a way that is at once compassionate and rational. This is a significant failure, because providing and financing health care have become, over the past half-century, the principal activity of the federal government [....]
The total will grow, because 76 million baby boomers are retiring, and as everyone knows, older people have much higher medical costs than younger people. In 2014, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, people 65 and over had average annual health costs of $10,494, about three times the $3,287 of people 35 to 44. Medicare and Medicaid, nonexistent in 1962, will bear the brunt of higher spending. [....]
We are left with a system in which medical costs are highly concentrated with the sickest patients. (The top 5 percent account for half of all medical spending.) This creates a massive resource transfer, through insurance and taxes, from the young and middle-aged to the elderly. (Half of all health spending goes to those 55 and over, who represent just over one-quarter of the population) [....]