Analyst's note: Did you ever ....? Absolutely must read. Good grief .... we also note Doctors, Hospitals Demanding Patients Pay Entire Deductible Up Front Thanks to Obamacare
[....] The rocky rollout of Obamacare isn’t limited to website problems. According to a report from Bloomberg, many doctors and clinics are now demanding that people pay the entire deductible on their insurance before they will be seen. Obamacare will increase that practice, since a huge number of plans under Obamacare have low premiums with huge deductibles.
The second-cheapest Obamacare plan in California has a $2,000 annual deductible. Hospitals want deductibles paid up front to ensure they receive their cash rather than being stiffed on the back end. Meanwhile, employers are jumping on the high deductible bandwagon, with 34 percent of insured workers having deductibles higher than $1,000. [....]
We also see Obamacare levies fines on non-profit hospitals that offer free healthcare to the poor.
Who are we to believe? See Don’t Buy the Hype: U.S. Remains World’s Safe Haven Despite D.C.'s Antics.
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President Obama keeps saying over and over again that not raising the debt ceiling would have caused economic catastrophe. This is, of course, quite dishonest as the debt ceiling and default on our debt have no direct connection.
But we did what Obama asked anyway, and what did we get for it? Another downgrade in the nation’s credit score. Let’s see what their reasoning was…
from France 24:
A Chinese ratings agency downgraded its US sovereign credit rating Thursday despite Washington’s resolution of the debt ceiling deadlock, warning that fundamentals for a potential default remained “unchanged”.
Dagong lowered its ratings for US local and foreign currency credit from A to A-, maintaining a negative outlook, the agency said in a statement.
The announcement came after the US Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed a bill that extends the nation’s borrowing authority and ends a two-week government shutdown.
"The fundamental situation that the debt growth rate significantly outpaces that of fiscal income and gross domestic product remains unchanged," Dagong said in the statement, adding Washington’s solvency was vulnerable as old debts were still repaid through raising new debts.
"Hence the government is still approaching the verge of default crisis, a situation that cannot be substantially alleviated in the foreseeable future," it said.
See, President Obama and the establishment politicians on Capitol Hill (on both sides of the aisle) live in a backwards world where the key to keeping your fiscal house in order is to run up as much debt as you can. America is using credit cards to pay its credit card bills, and that just can’t go on forever.
We are now $17 Trillion in debt and climbing. $17 Trillion! What does that even mean?
[....]
So, the National Debt has reached its $17 Trillion limit, and today Congress will vote to raise the debt ceiling yet again.
But what does it even mean that we’re $17 trillion in debt? Let’s try to put things in perspective.
- 17 trillion $1 bills stack one on top of the other would reach over 1 million miles high, more than 4 times higher than the moon
- $17 Trillion, divided up, would equal $52,678 of debt for every man woman and child in America
- If you spent $1 million every day, it would take you 51,000 years to spend $17 Trillion
- With $17 Trillion, you could feed, cloth, and educate every child in the world
- With $17 Trillion dollars you could pay every teacher’s salary in the United States for the next 153 years
- With $17 Trillion, you could buy every man woman and child in America two Volkswagen Jettas
- With $17 Trillion, you could buy every sports team in the world and still have $16 Trillion left over
- With $17 Trillion, you could buy the American supply of bacon for the next 8,500 years
- With $17 Trillion dollars you could buy all 3.8 million people in Los Angeles the world’s most expensive car, the Lamborghini Veneno
- With $17 Trillion, you could start your own space program, spend $2b more than NASA every year, and stay in business for 850 years
- With $17 Trillion, you could continue the war in Iraq for more than 200 years
These numbers are still difficult to grasp. What’s not difficult to grasp is that such debt is unsustainable. Raising the debt ceiling today will only allow the problem to get worse.
Washington politicians on both sides of the aisle continue to spend future generations’ money with no serious attempts to have a balanced budget or an actual reduction in spending. Even when you hear politicians talk about “reducing the deficit,” they’re only talking about a minuscule reduction in the speed at which we increase our debt. We still spend more, and the debt still goes up, just not quite as fast.
The only way the debt will ever go down is if Washington begins to seriously reduce spending. Taxation won’t do it. Even taxing 100% of every American’s income wouldn’t come close to paying off this debt. Our irresponsible spending has to stop. It won’t be easy either. As a nation, we have difficult choices to make in the years ahead. At the moment, Congress and the President refuse to even spend $1 less this year than we did last year. Does that sound reasonable to you?
$17 Trillion is a staggering, mind-blowing amount of money, and the problem that will only keep getting worse unless we make some serious changes in Washington.
