Another important statistic I found related to the, what should be an easy to understand concept but apparently is not, that when consumers are actively involved in purchasing goods, prices drop and service increases as competition forces competitors to attract customers.


Today, 7 in 8 health care dollars are paid by Medicare, Medicaid or private insurance companies. Because there's no real health care market, costs rose 467 percent over the last three decades.

By contrast, prices fell in the few medical areas not covered by insurance, like plastic surgery and LASIK eye care. Patients shop around, forcing health providers to compete.

The National Center for Policy Analysis found that from 1999 to 2011 the price of traditional LASIK eye surgery dropped from over $2,100 to about $1,700.

The Z blog

Humans live in a finite world. The universe may be infinite, but the world of man is finite. There’s only so much stuff. Because there is only so much stuff, there’s always going to be a shortage of the stuff that people tend to like or need. It’s not always a desperate shortage, but there’s never enough so that everyone can take what they want. There’s always going to be one more hand reaching for the last item just after it is gone.

This is a basic axiom of life and one of the foundation truths of economics. It’s even a foundation truth of communism, which assumes scarcity can only be mitigated, but never fully eliminated, by the elimination of profit. Economists of all stripes work from the assumption that scarcity is an immutable fact of the human condition. The question they wrestle with is how to increase supply and distribute the results.

What this means is that all goods and services must be rationed. Since there’s never enough to meet the maximum demand, there has to be some way to say “no” to people demanding the goods or services. The most common way to do this is price. The poor guy who wants a Mercedes is told he cannot have a Mercedes by the big numbers on the price tag. This is how the supply of luxury cars is rationed.

The other way to ration goods and services is for men with guns to take control of the supply and create rules for who can and who cannot have access to the stuff.  Rocket propelled grenades are not very expensive. An RPG can be had for around $500 and the rounds are about $100. The government, at least in America, controls the supply of RPG’s and determines who can have them. In other words, the government rations the supply of RPG’s in America.

This is an iron law of economics. All goods and services are rationed. This is true for health care too. There are no exceptions to this law. Thus, the First Truth of Health Care: No health care plan or system can ever be taken seriously unless it addresses, up front, how it will say “No, you cannot have it” to people who want it. At some point, someone has to tell the patient they cannot have whatever it is they want or need.

In America, rationing is mostly done by price, but increasingly the state is taking over this role. In Britain, most people are denied services by the long lines for those services. The long wait times for basic services is a form of rationing. If you can deliver X per day and the demand is for 2X, you solve this by giving people numbers and having them wait a long time until their number is called. This is socialized medicine in nutshell.

The fact is, most people could pay out of pocket, for their health services. It is only when poor people get old or have accidents when they need someone to pay for their medical care. Most middle-class people should be able to put away a little every payday to reserve for their later years. That is, if they were not being taxed into poverty by the current system in America that has seen prices rise five times the inflation rate.

Thus, the Second Truth of Health Care: The current insurance model is just a wealth transfer from the middle-class to the health care industry, in order to cover the cost of poor people and the metastasizing layer of people who live off the system. Those is really just a tax. Most people use about 5% of their plan for themselves, the rest is used to pay for poor people and the army of people who work in the system.

That’s the thing politicians never want to discuss, which is the whole reason they are talking about health care in the first place. How does a modern society pay for the poor, who cannot afford needed medical services? How to we address the free riders on the system? More important, how much are we willing to pay for the health services to the poor? There’s a limit to all of this and that’s the question that always has to be answered.

Of course, one of the paradoxes of modern life is that you can get very rich off the poor, which is why liquor stores and furniture rental shops dot the ghetto. In the social welfare game, the point is to lay a massive guilt trip on the public, and grease the right political palms, in order to get the middle class to look the other way as their money is siphoned off for one program or another for the poor, always administered by a rich guy coincidentally.

Thus, the Third Truth of Health Care: Health services are a massive skimming operation. Today, the one area of the economy that “grows” is the health care industry. Every year, more and more people pile into that wagon, mostly in administrative roles. The number of nurses and doctors does not grow very much, but the number of bureaucrats grows like a weed.

Then you have the pill makers, machine makers, research people and lawyers. There are always lots and lots of lawyers. The health care industry is massive and government dependent. It’s why rub rooms are now called message therapy centers. They are angling to get it on the racket, by having their service declared an essential health care service. That way, you will be paying for some guy to get a happy ending.

That’s why reforming health care has become an impossibility. As soon as anyone makes any noises about fixing the system, the army of lobbyists, hired by every vested interest, shows up to bury the reformers. If they are not able to kill the idea of reform entirely, they set about corrupting it into another grift that their clients can use to get a free shot at your wallet. The only people not represented in these efforts are the voters. They get no say.

This is the main reason Trump’s efforts to address the problems of ObamaCare failed last week. What Ryan and the other crooks in the GOP were hoping to do is pass a bill that made it easier for their paymasters to skim money from the rate payers, while providing fewer services. Ryan’s bill was just an attempt to help the people feeding at the trough get a little fatter off the middle-class. Its failure suggests we have reached the end phase.

Talk to anyone responsible for paying health insurance premiums and they will tell you that the rates are reaching the point where they cannot be paid. When premiums are going up by multiples of inflation, there can be only one result. Once rates pass a certain level, people stop paying those premiums. You get black markets, non-compliance and a system that can only persist through brute coercion. Soon after you get collapse.

It does no good pointing out logic. Just like the arguments against minimum wage. My stupid little city (surprise, surprise run by Democrats) is in the middle of their push for a $15 min wage. Prices will increase and some jobs will go away. A very few will make just enough money to keep them trapped in $hit jobs. Yea! Let's celebrate! (dumb$hits)

By the way, has anyone else noticed the technique being used by more and more business (mostly restaurants, but others)  where you perform task typically done by an employee? More and more semi-fast food places have you bus the table when finished. More and more restaurants have order and pay at your table Ipads. I've also noticed a greater number of drink re-fill stations. I'm not talking McDonalds but sit down places. All these things together eliminate one or two servers per shift. If you've flown lately, you might have noticed you can now check your own luggage in, attached the tracking sticker and drop it off next to the X-Ray machine. Fewer and fewer skycaps.

The point is, wait until these $15 minimum wage laws hit. That money is coming out of the owners pockets and he'll do exactly what anyone would do, including crybaby liberals: he'll find a way to recoup that lost revenue. He'll either hire fewer people, raise prices or find a way to cut services.

Build a wall, deport illegals, and watch wages rise on their own. Pay enough, and people will do any job.

Liberals are the worst. They are the cause of much of this nation's misery.

WebsterMark wrote on 03/31/17 at 06:57:10:

So you think a higher minimum wage will cripple small business, but deporting low wage immigrants will create a boon in good paying jobs?...
What alchemy is that?...

I don't believe you've ever been anywhere near a business class...

A $15 per hour minimum wage will cripple a small business,... but take away low wage workers and that same small business will pay a living wage?....
This is "rob Peter to pay Paul" business logic....

WebsterMark, I think you are right on.

The problem with Americans is we look around and compare ourselves to other Americans or a few other Western Culture countries. The problem is We are not the norm in a world environment, in fact we are quite opposite of the norm.

When we started this company 32 years ago 100 percent of the materials we distribute were made in American today maybe 40 percent is made in America. It's funny I like to watch the show "Shark Tank" and what is the first thing everybody looks to "Foreign manufacturing", in fact one guy insisted he make his product in the US and he got laughed out of the tank.

The government is trying very hard to keep the peace in this country buy stealing from Peter to pay Paul because they are aware of what is going to happen when it all starts falling apart. No one in America is willing to take less and do what is right but that is what we are faced with.

Here in Richmond the city is Broke like the rest of the cities. The mayor asked the people to do one thing, can they bag their own leaves instead of the city in order to lower cost. You would have thought they ask to turn off the electricity.

The people tried to do something about our situation to elect someone outside the norm in hopes of getting something done but that wont happen. The entrenched establishment is going to take him out eventually or at least not let anything happen till they again are back in power. In 5 years we will be 30 trillion in debt in ten years 40 trillion.

There is really only one solution because every single country is in debt as much as we are. And that is to form one world government that can not be in debt to itself and eliminating all debts. Actually I am quite surprised that no one has mentioned it yet.

Of course we all know how this will work out.....in the words of the Terminator "we are destined to destroy ourselves, it's in our nature".

Come Lord Jesus!

If a guy has fifty women who would go out with him, he doesn't really hafta be extra careful about how he treats them. If she's not happy, he can just grab the next one.
If an employer has a huge pool of unemployed people to pick from, all desperate for a paycheck, he can hire for next to nothing and treat them like dirt.
Eliminate as many people from the labor pool as possible and force employers to bid against each other for employees. Wages go up, how the employees get treated improves.
The employer is forced to pay what the work is worth. No sacker or burger flipper can produce enough monetary benefit to the bottom line to justify fifteen bucks an hour.

I'm limited to just explaining it. I can't understand it for you, too.