by Karl Denninger, Market Ticker:
The details are still a bit thin but…..
There is no reduction in the debt on the table. That is, the government refuses to cut spending to less than what it can take in via taxes.
The growth in “mandatory” programs, specifically CMS, is where the problem is as I’ve pointed out for 30 years, all the way back to long before this column was originated and when I was running MCSNet. Its a math problem when you get down to it, but that also means its a serious political problem because waving your arms around will do nothing.
What makes it worse is that all of it is illegal. 15 USC Chapter 1 makes what our medical and pharmaceutical firms do on a daily basis federal felonies carrying 10 year prison terms — for each person screwed, and each occurrence. Two decisions, Royal Drug (440 U.S. 205 (1979)) and Maricopa County (457 U.S. 332 (1982)) both found that there is no immunity from anti-trust law for medical providers, medical “insurance” companies or drug companies.
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None.
These decisions have stood unchallenged since 1982. No statute has modified them. The cited claim of immunity in the first (McCarran-Ferguson) was disposed of as not applicable, so that sort of claim regarding insurance firms is void too as res judicata (already decided.)
Neither political party nor any of the States have in the 40 years since prosecuted anyone for these violations, nor sent anyone to prison — including those who got slapped for doing it in the cases that went to the court originally themselves. None have forced the end of discriminatory pricing practices. California has gone even further and claimed authority to enact same at a state level despite the Supreme Court throwing up all over what they did in the 1982 decision prior to the state’s act and nobody has gone after them either.
We cannot resolve the fiscal mess in the United States without resolving this. There is no possible resolution without not only putting an end to this but removing it on a forward basis. The cash-basis deficit within CMS is larger than the entire federal deficit for last year. That is, if you fixed it there would be no deficit. The inflation you see today would not exist. The destruction of your purchasing power over the last several administrations would not have, in the main, happened.
The parties will not take this on because you won’t force them to. Instead you wish to talk about other things, all of which I’m sure you think are very important. Without resolving this, however, there is no way to stop the inflationary monster that is eating your financial health alive and there is also no way to prevent what will inevitably occur: The collapse of the US medical system when it can no longer extract any more money, and if you need it at that point or beyond you will be dead.
Obamacare was all about trying to buy said system a few more years. The covid “countermeasures” paid for by the government were as well. The facts are that staffed beds have fallen by about a third since 1975 but the cost incurred in hospitals has skyrocketed. During the last three years 18% of all persons hospitalized with a specific virus died yet in some counties, including mine, nearly 9 out of 10 died during a six month period — specifically, the back half of 2021 which was much worse than the first few months when we allegedly “knew nothing” as this was a brand new disease. Our government’s policy was to pay bonuses for treatments even when they didn’t work and even when they led to wildly out-of-norm and above average fatality rates — in some cases, such as here, when said policies and “treatments” produced fatalities (failure) at five times the average rate across the nation as a whole.
Nobody has done anything about any of it, nor has one politician so much as raised a hand and asked for formal inquiry and explanation. The money blown on these objectively-worthless measures — after all, if you leave in a box the measures obviously were in fact worthless — drove up the inflation rate in your state and town anyway and while you can debate whether the inflation is worth it if the treatments are successful there is no debate to be had when they fail.
ALL of these payments were made through and by CMS.
