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Economic Inequities

6/19/2021

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I am wondering more and more about economic inequities.  I'm not thinking about CRT, or critical race theory, or anything else that defines the gaps between poor and disadvantaged and just poor.  No doubt they are large and important, but rather about two areas that could with easy fixes improve the lives of millions of people, black, white, Asian, etc.  A few years ago, before I made it to the golden years when social security kicked in and when I was using regular health insurance that often had limited coverage, I found myself in a position where one of my family needed mental health counseling.  The cost of that counseling for the three visits that the health insurance covered most  of the cost and the Doctor got instead of $240, he just received $ 80...Doctor and the provider they had cut a deal.   But when these three visits covered by the insurance plan were done, and I had to keep going to see the same doctor, then my out of pocket went up to $240 an hour.  For the health care guys he said -- "Okay, $ 80 is a good rate or at least I can live with it if I have to because...."  he had people like me and other people who were paying full price to  cover the difference.   Moral of the story -- if you are poor, if you have no insurance coverage, if your insurance is unwilling to pay, then you are expected to subsidize the lucky people who have an  insurance company working for them or more honestly for their shareholders bottom line.   This creates economic inequity and its not necessary.  We could fix it and Obama Care is trying to do that. If everyone is on one form of insurance and if a standard rate for charges is established, as it is with the Medicare systems rate schedule,  with some maximum rate to charge people without insurance set by that schedule.  If the general rate has to go up for medicare payments to cover losses, then it should go up and set the floor for insurance companies as well.   Prices will more back towards reasonable rates for everything from doctors visits, to tests, to hospital stays.

This is one easy to fix inequity, a second one is even easier.  If you have good   credit, then you are offered lower rates, but if your credit is shot then you are in hock for life.  No one in his right mind should want to pay 28% a year for interest on the debt owed.  They used to drive money changers out of the Temple, and we need anti-usury laws that set maximum rates for revolving credit based on rates set by the Federal Reserve or even some Prime Lending rate plus a few percent for risk.  If you reduced the usury then you would have more people able to pay down their debt and the economy would grow more strongly.  Simple to solve.  Again its always the poor, the disadvantaged, the weakest citizens who are taken to the cleaners. 

Forget Infrastructure -- concentrate on solving these two problems and you will have people saying -- yes, it impacts me, so what if the bridge falls down in Tennessee, each month I see what I am paying in needless interest or out of pocket medical bills that I know other people don't have to pay, not because the insurance company is paying, but because the doctors and hospitals will accept a smaller amount.  Truth in lending and truth in medical cost bills should be the Democrats next priority.  

1 Comment

UFOs -- Please Help Galactic Federation, Beam up Donald Trump, etc.

6/4/2021

0 Comments

 
Since I was a small boy, trying to get to sleep at night, I've told stories in my head, fanciful tales about worlds beyond ours and alien races.  All of these stories devolve around a kind of myth about  how a higher order race  converts a human being into a near immortal for the purpose of rapidly advancing the human race beyond the current dead-ends of science, religion, and politics, so that humans can evolve and expand into the billions o star of this gallaxy.  Every since the first humans looked up at the stars they have wondered about a single question -- where did they come from.  I've read a fair number of books by eminent physicists talking about Einstein's theory, black matter, and the unanswered questions of why the Universe exists.  Everyone seems to skip the underlying question -- where did that first massive molecule that exploded into the "Big Bang" come from.  Did it simply spring into existence in some kind of quantum storm or mistake, or is there a God.  We ignore all of this because we want to make sense about what we can't understand.

There are more than a billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy and it would beggar the imagination to think that we are the only intelligent creature or Earth is unique as a planet.  It might also seem incredible to believe that Albert Einstein and all the scientists since have answers to the questions about what is gravity or how going faster than light is impossible.  We relegate stories to a genre of SiFi and are very creative in making real a Universe that is more real than the idea that we are alone or that traveling across space and even time is impossible.  So it should not be surprising that some people see these UFO's for what they may really be -- alien space craft.  

But lets take that idea and play with it.  If they were really UFOs, if the the Israeli former Intelligence Chief's sudden disclosure about some group called the Galactic Federation has a germ of truth, or that as some seeming nut cases believe there are five different alien races that are in contact with the US or others, then why all the sightings, what's the point.

In my mind one point might be to make real the impossible, to make the world's people, querulous, spiteful, etc. start to accept the possibility that there are other races and peoples, if the sudden interest and seemingly daily observations of these craft were what I would write in a story, then I'd say we are getting closer to that momentous day when we have First Contact. 

Of course we might hope that it comes from Asghar protectors of Stargate, not Gould or Ori.  We might hope it is not Klingon or Romulin of Star Trek, or Peacekeepers and Skarn of Farscape, or worse yet, Dalits and Cybermen of Dr. Who.  Lets hope whoever masters interstellar travel is the good kind of aliens, not the worst of the worst. 

So if they are benevolent, then they might think about beaming up a few Republican politicians, QAnon conspiracy people, and of course Donald Trump, it would help everyone get through this perilous time.   
  
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    Dr. David L Blond is a well known economists with experience in government and the private sector. Published in 2014, The Phoenix Year, an economic thriller about the events leading up to the global market collapse  New novel available on Kindle --The Rings of Armageddon based on insights learned during his 7 years as the Senior and only economist in the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon. 

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