Financial Stupidity

                It’s the day after Christmas and our life can now settle back into more normal concerns. Gray skies, chillier than usual, high only 58 degrees. Wah! We Arizonans are really spoiled when we complain about highs only in the upper 50’s, while most of the country is freezing or shoveling ass-deep snow. I remember what that daily shoveling was like in my lake-effect-snow life south of Buffalo. I’d rather be complaining about fifty degrees than battling the snow monsters.

          I’ve been looking for something to write about in this blog and came up with socialized medicine. I must confess I’m not very well-informed on the subject. I know it’s one of the sticking points that separate most Republicans from most Democrats, an offshoot of the states’ rights versus federal control. It seems, though, that we’re much closer to socialized medicine that we were only a few decades ago. We now have Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. The question about universal medical care involves the financing. Who’d be paying for it? Employers and individuals or the federal government? Bernie Sanders had quite a few voters who agreed with his plan. Somewhere recently, I saw an estimate of what a totally socialized medicine would cost, a little over three trillion dollars a year. Whew! That a bunch of money. But wouldn’t that cost come down if the federal government regulated what doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies could charge? Canada seems to have a system that works. How are they able to maintain reasonable medical costs? I may be a dumb-head about the issue, but I’m amazed and appalled at the exorbitance of our present medical costs, especially that of the pharmaceuticals. I can also see that we’d have fewer students wanting to become doctors and surgeons if their fees were regulated to levels they considered unacceptable. So, did the quality of medical care come down to unacceptable levels in Canada? I’m betting they didn’t, but I’d have to talk to a Canadian to see what he/she thought. In any case, something needs to be done about universal medical care one way of the other. I’m hoping for the other.

          Another thought about our needs—our rapidly failing infrastructure. When are we going to do something about our highways, bridges, power grids, rail systems, airports, and all the rest of our infrastructure? According to Fortune Magazine, we’d need about four trillion over the next ten years to fix it all. Even now, instead of spending the five billion Trump wants for his wall, why not instead fix at least some of our infrastructure needs?

          Both of these subjects probably reveal my fiscal naiveté. I never got very good grades in economics classes. I still don’t understand national costs and national debts. Where does money originate and when we need some, from whom are we borrowing it?