The whole point of MoE is to try to ensure that money for Medicaid is used for Medicaid, rather than being shifted elsewhere in the budget, possibly to tax cuts. To some extent, shifting is unavoidable... Max
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Of course. I was just objecting to the idea that wage demands were somehow interfering with fed stimulus funds. How can that be, when the whole point was to keep unemployment and underemployment from rising higher and higher.
Anyway there are related problems in education and there will be similar arguments over the high costs of teachers salaries, and so on.
How is it the pain pours down like a waterfall, while money trickles down in tiny dribbles?
I watched Naomi Klein, William Greider and Elizabeth Warren last night on Charlie Rose, dealing with the big picture. They were certainly reassuring. I went to bed in a dark cloud.
Below is something I wrote last night about healthcare.
``Makes me all warm and fuzzy to get this after the single-payer advocates got shut out of the hearing last week....'' DC
My reaction was something between dark cloud and slow burn. It's double bad. About the only good side is that the combination of no single payer and chump unions will keep both out of play. Why is that good? Because I think the greed and need for control by all the corporate players will cancel each other to stalemate. There are very few possible alliances out there.
I think the whole plan whatever it comes to be, will implode. If we are lucky it will die fast following Hilary Clinton's efforts fifteen years ago. If we are not lucky and it passes it will follow the Medicare part D track. It will be unworkable, do nothing, cost lots, and linger in oblivion.
Two other things I am trying to sort out. With rising unemployment, and flat to failing wages, what does `affordable' health care mean? Here is another mystery item. Why is the so-called Healthcare sector one of the few that has either steady or slightly rising employment figures. That has certainly not been the case in my end of the business.
Where I worked was in healthcare equipment and services. The latter are all going broke or being consolidated into larger and larger re- organization plans or shuffled around by investment firms. But this is just a temporary fix, because larger and larger systems are going broke. Of course the first thing that happens under consolidations is layoffs.
What's driving the whole industry is both public and private healthcare insurers who run denial of service systems. Because of falling or stalled sales the manufacturers are also going broke. Shipping manufacturing to Mexico and China bought some time in the 90s but that time is now ended. The technical service phone banks at major insurance carriers and manufacturers are a mixed bag, so they tried to ship as much as possible off to India and Pakistan. But that also bought very little time, didn't work, and that is ending.
What I am saying is the economic systems of the health and medical care businesses are breaking down right along with the rest of the economy. So far nothing from either Congress or Team Obama will fix any of these problems. They might actually make them worse and cause more failures.
And then a last thing I am waiting to watch. State government failures.
Most of the money for the healthcare system comes from government via the client holding their public and private plans. In my former business the majority of claims were for public sector plans like Medicare, Medicaid, VA, Worker Comp, etc. When the state fails, all those claims don't get paid, so the food chains that depends on them collapse. When the feds cut Medicare budgets, the whole industry starts to unravel. Each time Medicare's fee schedule is modified, a wave goes through the private insurance business to re-adjust to the new, worse, service denial fee schedule. So Medicare drives the entire system.
You can see some of the effects of this by watching Invacare (IVC) and its performance on the S&P. It had a high in Aug 08 of 26.58, and a low in Dec 08, 13.30. It's up to 16.xx this week. So Invacare is crashing.
Their competitor (according to Yahoo) is Hill-Rom Holdings (HRC). I had to look them up. They basically sell to hospitals and institutions and their equipment lines follow everything in a hospital that isn't termed invasive care. In other words they sell everything that isn't medicine: machines, beds, tables, etc. They also own medical software. They like Invacare are a mini- conglomerate. Their real business is buying businesses that make things. They are doing even worse than Invacare with high Sept 08, 34.69 and low Mar 09, 8.57. That looks something like the auto industry.
The competitor for both is Sunrise Medical and they too are a conglomerate that specializes in buying businesses. Sunrise started out to be a conglomerate. All through the the 80s and 90s they bought and sold manufacturing companies in the US, UK and Germany. Here is the million dollar quote:
``For the fiscal year of 1988, although revenues amounted to $140 million, the company recorded a loss of $10.9 million on discontinued operations. Nonetheless, the company's five core businesses, Bio- Clinic, Guardian, Quickie, Joerns, and Sunrise Medical Ltd., all posted over $25 million in sales for the year and were recognized as market leaders in their respective fields.''
http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Sunrise-Medical-Inc- Company-History.html
The CFO of Bio-Clinic during 1994-5 was charged with insider trading in a several million dollar fraud scheme. The SEC and the FDA are well acquainted with Sunrise.
After much digging I found Sunrise Medical Ltd (formerly ABEC) was based in Manchester, and in yet another reorganization plan was dissolved in 2007. This was part of a bigger plan to get out of publicly traded stockmarkets and go back to private ownership under some investment firm called VSM Investors and Sunrise Mobility (manufacture holding company), which also split off DeVilbiss, a manufacturer of compressors.
What none of these healthcare companies want to face is the bulk of their business is labor intensive and demands a relatively high skilled labor force. So they work tirelessly to kill off that work force. The minute NAFTA was installed they all sent as much as possible down to Mexico, especially those divisions under heavy EPA regulatory requirements, like chroming facilities. Stay away from the Rio Grande if you know what's good for you. Formerly Invacare dump their plant waste into Lake Erie. Others spun off whole sectors to China and imported the manufactured product back here to put a US manufacturer decals on the product. Electronics is another of these that went beyond US borders.
The point to going into this, is that the healthcare industry is a mini-model of all that is wrong with US policy all the way down.
CG