Obamacare unconstitutional Follow

Doctor's need a healthy salary, but not profit. And no hospitals, funded by taxpayers through government, do not need a profit. There's this thing, called a budget and this other thing called limited resources.

Sorry, I was talking about their comparison to other rival countries defense budgets. It would ask the question of "Are we spending more money because we feel the need to have excessive project-able force available for deterrence/threat mitigation/emotional insecurity reasons, or do we just pay too much for an appropriate level of project-able force" This would let us form a better response; either we have a system that needs structural reform in the financing, or we should have a discussion about what level of force we should should have available.

The author just talks about the first section, and I believe we would be better served by analysis that showed to what extent each was an issue, such that we could make better decisions on how to fix it.

(Simple version:
If we purchase (equivalent) jets at $110M and China purchases jets at $100M, but we just buy 10x as many jets, restructuring the financing isn't all that important, whereas if our jets cost $300M to their $100M, we need to fix our market, regardless of how many jets we purchase. In the real case, we are quite likely both spending too much per product and buying too many copies, although for some military hardware, the engineering costs force us to have a large quantity for it to be a worthwhile investment if the number of copies is reduced significantly.)

True, but that's an artifact of the insurance industry offering volume discounts on it's services. It would be more ideal for the consumer to be able to pick out services at all orders of delivery, rather than an employer, who can change, or fiddle around with the plan rather than changing strict financial compensation.

It's also much easier for the employee to decide on their place of work when everything is in the same units, rather than a mixed blend of cash, benefits and other comp, excluding say, stock options and pretax retirement accounts, as those are easier to factor, and make sense to do for other reasons.

Without knowing how we're spending the money, I don't see how you can have an intelligent discussion about how appropriate that amount is at all. Defending how our spending compares to anyone else's spending should come well after we've determined what we're actually spending money on.

On the flip side, noticing that we're spending eight times more than anyone else and well in excess of everyone else combined, should set off a thought "Hey, maybe we should look at those books and see if we need to be spending this much."

From either side of the aisle, I can't see how anyone can claim to be against government waste and overspending and not be trying to put the Pentagon to the wall over this. A failure to do so is an admission that appeasing the Pentagon means more to you than any meaningful attempt at fiscal responsibility.

But even without looking at their numbers as an outside observer, we could form some type of metric to measure the force, from that and the spending numbers, triangulate and diagnose.

I do agree that it's trivially easy to see that yes, a problem does exist; and that it is at odds with the anti-waste mantra that is often rolled out by supporters of the current appropriations budgets. I guess cognitive dissonance is better than them calling to privatize social security. By which I mean the military.

Edited, Feb 6th 2011 5:53am by Timelordwho