04/24/09 Tampa Bay, Florida My eyes fell upon the opening sentence, as I thought that the New York Post was asking a comical question, “How absurd is the price of health care in New York City?” which I thought would be followed by a comical retort, such as, “So high that it makes you sick!” Hahaha!
Unfortunately, I got it all wrong, which I would have known if I had taken the time to read past the headline, “In$ure Poorhouse” to the subhead, “Health Rates Now More Than Rents.”
Anyway, the news is that “It now costs more to buy health insurance than it does to rent a two-bedroom apartment in the Financial District,” which would seem to be signs of serious inflation in healthcare!
Well, not being from New York, I naturally assumed that the Financial District was a dangerous, low-rent slum of some kind, populated (as it is) by lowlife, lying, thieving scumbags stealing everyone blind with trading to rack up fees and expenses while yammering their “invest for the long-term” idiocies.
If so, I can see how rents would be low, low, low, given the low character of the neighborhood denizens, and so for health insurance premiums to exceed that pittance was not very newsworthy. Wrong!
The Post reports, “The average monthly premium for family health coverage has soared from $3,866 last April to $4,354 – a 13 percent increase – according to a Post analysis of new data from the state Insurance Department,” while the monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the Financial District was $3,947, in a “no-doorman building downtown.”
The highest monthly health insurance premiums for a family were pushing almost $7,000 a month! A month!
And lest anyone think that the reason for such staggering insurance premiums was the sole fault of the greedy, grubby healthcare and insurance industries, we learn that they have a good point, in that “The insurance industry blames the rate hikes on the generous coverage mandated by state law,” which refers to the governmental idiocies of passing laws that healthcare providers had to give first-class-everything medical treatment for anybody who asks for it, whether they had insurance or not, whether they had any money or not, and the bill would be spread among the insured patients. Hahaha!
The funny part, for me, was that the insurance industry also blamed all the inflation in health insurance premiums on “a co-pay structure last changed in the mid-1990s” – as if Congress is going to make anybody pay anything, unless they are the taxpayers and the insured! Hahaha! Do you think I was born yesterday? Hahahaha!
So, anybody saying that inflation is low, when the price of inflation includes such huge increases in healthcare insurance, is obviously wrong.
And whenever anyone brings up inflation in prices, you can be sure it is time for Mighty Mogambo Man (MMM) to spring (“boing!”) as if shot from a cannon, to tell all and sundry that there is nothing worse than inflation in prices – nothing! – not even like when your own mother calls you a disgusting pig and spits on you in front of your girlfriend, then they both start beating you up and stealing all your stuff, which never actually happened, but I could tell they were thinking it a couple of times.
And, while nothing can protect you from treachery by family members or fickle, backstabbing girlfriends, you can protect yourself from the terrors of inflation by buying gold, and sometimes (like now) gold can be bought so cheaply that it will be one of those times in history when a person, any person, a person like, say, you or me, can capitalize on the ruinous inflation of an irresponsible government’s deficit-spending financed by an irresponsible Federal Reserve creating too much fiat money and credit, by buying gold and holding onto it as the price soars and soars and soars as the purchasing power of each existing dollar drops as each new one is being created.
Whee! This investing stuff is easy!
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Is this inflation, where health insurance costs more because we have to pay for all the riff raff and deadbeats? I thought inflation expansion in the money supply resulting in rising prices, not rising prices due to stupid moronic government regulations?
I thought inflation “meant”…
ianinvestorgirl,
inflation does mean expansion in the money supply… but it is impossible to predict how all that new money will affect final consumer prices… however, govt. mandated bubbles are a sure fire magnetic attractor for those fresh new fiat dollars… housing bubble has burst, financial bubble too… but healthcare bubble is still being inflated…
She just likes to think for herself… waking up to contradictions in DR propaganda…
Kind of neat how the pig flu came out just in time to stop the news cycle from covering Hank Paulson’s crooked despicable criminal behavior regarding Bank of America and Merrill.
I don’t think Lewis is an inch better than Paulson, not without some backbone. Had he gone public earlier, i.e. at the (right) time when the meeting had been happening or shortly after, he could be seen as a man, now. But…, now he is only a bitch with some sort of conscience. The timing with the popping up of the flu should be seen as coincidental, unless, that is, you are a believer in (really big) conspiracies.
Do you really think he’s going public with this because of his conscience?
It seems to me it makes more sense to pay for health care and not health insurance.
Why not have single payer health care?
This works in every other advanced country on this earth.
Why do you think he is? I, honestly, see no real other reason which would make sense to me. Has Lewis any material advantage by his disclosure?
Should have read ‘from’ his disclosure…