full of luv

Sure, have the Feds mandate that each county is required to set up clinics and provide free health care to all illegals in their county, guess how fast there would be a wall going up.

You can choose to have mass entitlements / or mass immigration but no country can have both.

Mesabah

The poor without healthcare, AND illegals.

rickair7777

No, it's "out of control" because it's capabilities, and therefore costs, keep increasing. But people don't want to pay more for more capabilities.

Preventative care won't solve the problem for poor and illegals, their lifestyles are still going to be unhealthy due to poor choices.

OOfff

Assuming those numbers are true (dubious), what about the other 93% of spending on healthcare? (250b/3.5t)

Firefighterpilo

As a current firefighter/paramedic for a low socioeconomic city in California. I can say those numbers are on the low side. The % of undocumented workers who use the 911 system and ERs for primary care is staggering. They call for everything from the flu to nightmares.

OOfff

So double it, and we still have 85% of spending to deal with

Mesabah

The numbers are directly from the CDC, my post is dubious because it is the MINIMUM number of visits they make. The number is potentially way higher, but NOT lower. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2017/074.pdf

Mesabah

I have no idea what you are getting at? I don't think you understand how healthcare works. I'll give you an example though. Imagine the airlines let the poor travel for free, how much would a ticket cost for someone who is paying?

Kifaru

I wouldn’t worry too much about her. Only 4% of the eligible voters in her district showed up for the primary and she was unopposed in the general. She’s so embarrassing and her ideas so harmful to every industry in the nation, I figure she better enjoy her two years of media coverage. In 2020 someone with a lot of money is going to successfully challenge her in the primary.

I didn’t read all the posts, if one of you already brought the point up.

Name User

That's an often quoted figure from the more conservative viewpoint and while I semi agree with the sentiment the actual nuts and bolts of why the poor and working poor class is growing isn't because of a cell phone.

If you go back to 1950 vs today what you'll find has gone up the most is housing - back then roughly 22% of the household budget went to your home and associated bills. Today it's double that at around 43%. That being said, when you look at what middle class homes were back then (and where they are located today) those same homes are still there (if they haven't been torn down and gentrified) but who is living there? Mostly ghetto and working poor neighborhoods.

Food and clothing spending is down, amazingly households used to spend more on food than they spent on housing. That changed as farms became mechanized and labor costs came down.

Spending on transportation is actually fairly flat - with modern production and longevity of vehicles these days cars are more expensive relative to inflation and we have more of them (because we have many two earner households) but they last considerably longer.

Lots of smartphones out today for under $100 on prepaid cell networks. As a % of budget, it's a pretty small amount for even the working poor. I do notice however when our newer FAs, earning $20,000 a year, have an expensive phone. (I was told I had an "old school" phone, an iPhone SE, I bought for $99)

College used to be fairly inexpensive relative to inflation and there was also a time when simply having a degree would guarantee you a job in the upper crust of earners. We've almost flipped in many areas such as computer science, employers these days are looking at graduates of short, focused "coding schools" which output qualified folks for a fraction of the cost of a four year degree.

This is a result of the government wanting to do well and give everyone access by giving subsidized loans to who ever signs on the dotted line, it was a boon at first but now the value of a college degree has been greatly diminished and costs have soared. A bad combo.