The whole debacle was a gift to the insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
What good does it do for people to have health insurance if they can't use it because the deductibles are too high? They are now both paying for insurance and then paying out of pocket for the doctor visits and their medications.
The insurance companies are saying that they have to raise the premiums because so many people are now being able to see a doctor. Bullshit.
And of course, congress didn't put anything in the bill to keep the insurance companies from doing this.
I'm sure it has helped some people who had catastrophic illnesses or major accidents, but what percentage of people fell into that category?
And we kept hearing that the ACA was the path to single payer. Really? Has anyone heard that someone in congress is working towards that? I haven't.
And Hillary came out and said that it will never, ever happen, while Bernie wanted it to and had great ideas for achieving it. Yet people chose Hillary instead.
Well the ones who actually voted for her.
I still question how many votes were flipped from Bernie to Hillary, and then there's all the people who weren't able to vote because their party affiliation got changed.
I think this is going as planned.

can find articles on how to make your own pitchforks and torches.

HEDGES: And there–let’s go back. They’re extracting money from the economy by debt peonage. By raising–.

HUDSON: By not playing a productive role, basically.

HEDGES: Right. So it’s credit card interest, mortgage interest, car loans, student loans, that’s how they make their funds.

HUDSON: That’s right. So they don’t, money is not a factor of production. But in order to have access to credit, in order to get the money, in order to get an education, you have to pay the banks. And at New York University here, for instance, they have Citibank, I think Citibank people were on the board of directors at NYU. You get the students, when they come here, to start at the local bank. And once you are in a bank and have monthly funds taken out of your account for electric, utilities, or whatever, it’s very hard to change.

So basically you have what the classical economists called the rentier class. The class that lives on economic rents. Landlords, monopolists charging more, and the banks. So that if you have a pharmaceutical company such that raises the rate of drug from $12 a shot to $200, that’s all of a sudden, their profits go up. Their increased price for the drug is created, is counted in the national income accounts, as if the economy is producing more. So all of this presumed economic growth that has all been taken by the 1% in the last ten years, and people say the economy is growing. But the economy isn’t growing–.

HEDGES: Because it’s not reinvested.

HUDSON: That’s right. It’s not–it’s not production, it’s not consumption. The wealth of the 1% is obtained by essentially lending money to the 99% and then charging interest on it, and recycling this interest at an exponentially growing rate.

HEDGES: And why is it important, as I think you point out in your book, that economic theory counts this rentier income as productive income? Explain why that’s important.

Chris Hedges interviews an economist.

I just pulled out some text from the middle.

HUDSON: If you’re a rentier, then you want to say that, hey, I earned my income by–.

HEDGES: We’re talking about Goldman Sachs, by the way.

HUDSON: Yeah, Goldman Sachs.

HEDGES: Is perfect.

HUDSON: Yes. The head of Goldman Sachs came out and said, Goldman Sachs workers are the most productive in the world. That’s why they’re paid what they are. And the concept of productivity in America is the income divided by the labor. So if you’re Goldman Sachs and you pay yourself $20 million a year in salary and bonuses, you’re considered to have added $20 million to GDP, and that’s enormously productive. So we’re talking with tautology. We’re talking with circular reasoning here.

So the issue is whether Goldman Sachs, Wall Street, predatory pharmaceutical firms, actually add a product or whether they’re just exploiting other people. And that’s why I called my book Parasitism, because the parasite, people think of the parasite as simply taking money, taking blood out of the host, or taking money out of the economy. But in nature, it’s much more complicated. The parasite can’t simply come in and take something. First of all, it needs to numb. It has an enzyme that numbs the host so the host doesn’t even realize the parasite’s there. And then the parasites have another enzyme that makes the host–it takes over the host’s brain. And it makes the host imagine that the parasite is part of the body, that actually part of itself, to be protected.

Well, that’s basically what Wall Street has done. It’s made, it depicts itself as part of the economy. Not as a wrapping around it. Not as external to it. But actually is the part that’s helping the body grow, and that actually is responsible for most of the growth, when in fact it’s the parasite that is taking over the growth.
So the result is an inversion of classical economics. It turns Adam Smith upside down. It says what the classical economists said was unproductive, parasitism, actually is the real economy, and the parasites are labor and industry, that get in the way of what the parasite wants, which is to reproduce itself, not help the host, the labor and capital [inaud.].

HEDGES: And then the classical economists like Adam Smith were quite clear that unless that rentier income, you know, the money made by things like hedge funds, was heavily taxed, and put back into the economy, the economy would ultimately go into a kind of tailspin. And I think the example of that, which you point out in your book, is what’s happened in terms of large corporations with stock dividends and buybacks. And maybe you can explain that.

Excellent post.

Here is the link

Michael Hudson and Chris Hedges: The Real World Cost of Turning Classical Economics Upside Down

Your article is on Medical Care & Rents

Only in the last couple of weeks, as I slide off TOP more and more, have I been at Naked Capitalism

I did two searches

Naked Capitalism Healthcare Costs

and

Naked Capitalism rent costs

And found several excellent articles. I put in this one.

Here is a link to just one more of the articles

Responding to Political Attacks on Single Payer

I pulled up 11 links from the two searches. And as I finish this comment I am struck about how little content there is at TOP. It is horse race and personality.

Thank god Obama "fixed" the economy and "saved" the housing market.

I went to a technical school for a year. They had a program for bank tellers that was taught partially by having a branch of a credit union on campus. You know I have never done business with a regular bank? 30 years and not once. So there is a point that people don't like to change. I am just the polar opposite.