US Debt Visualized

[UNI88]

No I’m not against healthcare

For starters, I’m against excessive testing, scare tactics and playing on your emotions that are designed to get you into their testing “universe” they will do this especially if they like your insurance

Body scans, MRIs, CT scans that are really not necessary and very expensive

CT scans are really not good for you anyway. And these scans always find something that wasn’t really what they were looking for in the first place to keep you going back to the doctor. You’re stuck emotionally because nobody wants to die and the medical field uses this against you. One of the best things I heard a doctor say was “you’re not gonna die from this, you’ll die with this” … he wasn’t talking to me, but the person he was talking to benefitted emotionally from that statement

And one of the reasons there is so much testing now is because everyone has insurance… and nobody negotiates on the price of medical procedures because they think their insurance will cover it ….so why negotiate …. these insurance companies can charge whatever they want

Oh man is there a crap ton of ignorance in this post.

What tests are necessary in your book? Have you ever been referred for an MRI? Are you aware of the hoops you often have to go through to get one? I am.

What about testing costs before deductibles are met? I had a good friend who I helped get into recovery in January. The cost for a 28 day program was $36,000. He had a $6,000 deductible through his employer based plan.

Have a seat son. You’re way over your skis on this one.

CH isn't completely wrong. There are probably some risk averse doctors who order unnecessary tests. Are the doctors the only ones to blame? Or should we also place some blame on plaintiffs bar attorneys and litigious twats like donald trump who sue people at the drop of a hat?

I know, I know - tDS, tDS, tDS, blah, blah, blah.

[Caribbean Hen]

No I’m not against healthcare

For starters, I’m against excessive testing, scare tactics and playing on your emotions that are designed to get you into their testing “universe” they will do this especially if they like your insurance

Body scans, MRIs, CT scans that are really not necessary and very expensive

CT scans are really not good for you anyway. And these scans always find something that wasn’t really what they were looking for in the first place to keep you going back to the doctor. You’re stuck emotionally because nobody wants to die and the medical field uses this against you. One of the best things I heard a doctor say was “you’re not gonna die from this, you’ll die with this” … he wasn’t talking to me, but the person he was talking to benefitted emotionally from that statement

And one of the reasons there is so much testing now is because everyone has insurance… and nobody negotiates on the price of medical procedures because they think their insurance will cover it ….so why negotiate …. these insurance companies can charge whatever they want

Oh man is there a crap ton of ignorance in this post.

What tests are necessary in your book? Have you ever been referred for an MRI? Are you aware of the hoops you often have to go through to get one? I am.

What about testing costs before deductibles are met? I had a good friend who I helped get into recovery in January. The cost for a 28 day program was $36,000. He had a $6,000 deductible through his employer based plan.

Have a seat son. You’re way over your skis on this one.

It’s a tough one and it’s exactly what the insurance industry prays on, the doctors will CT scan you to death if you allow them to

Note that I’m not talking about your situation but in generalities

[BDKJMU]

So why is it called Obamacare?

He got all the credit for it so he should also get all the blame

The blame is he didn’t go far enough, failing to establish a public option………like EVERY OTHER advanced economy that spends way less on healthcare with equal to if not better outcomes.

And every other advanced economy doesn’t have 1/2 their population being lard buckets. Because of that we will spend more with worse outcomes no matter what we do until we fix the diet/processed foods/lack of exercise/sitting on ass epidemic.

[BDKJMU]

All of the problems is, it’s not really healthcare at all. It’s health scare.

Approximately 16% of the population was uninsured prior to the ACA. That's dropped to approximately 8% today. If you were one of the approximately 8% who now has insurance it was not a "scare". That's roughly 23 million people.

How many of that 16% were illegal aliens?
How many of that 16% were legal immigrants? (To be a green card holder you aren’t suppose to be a public charge).

The % of US Citizens who were uninsured prior to ACA wasn’t that high.

[BDKJMU]

Oh man is there a crap ton of ignorance in this post.

What tests are necessary in your book? Have you ever been referred for an MRI? Are you aware of the hoops you often have to go through to get one? I am.

What about testing costs before deductibles are met? I had a good friend who I helped get into recovery in January. The cost for a 28 day program was $36,000. He had a $6,000 deductible through his employer based plan.

Have a seat son. You’re way over your skis on this one.

CH isn't completely wrong. There are probably some risk averse doctors who order unnecessary tests. Are the doctors the only ones to blame? Or should we also place some blame on plaintiffs bar attorneys and litigious twats like donald trump who sue people at the drop of a hat?

I know, I know - tDS, tDS, tDS, blah, blah, blah.

No that is a reasonable take.

[Caribbean Hen]

CH isn't completely wrong. There are probably some risk averse doctors who order unnecessary tests. Are the doctors the only ones to blame? Or should we also place some blame on plaintiffs bar attorneys and litigious twats like donald trump who sue people at the drop of a hat?

I know, I know - tDS, tDS, tDS, blah, blah, blah.

No that is a reasonable take.

Yep, the lawyers and the lawsuits are the real reasons the doctors order all the tests, they really don’t have any choice. If you opt out of the test, most of them are perfectly fine with it as well.

[Caribbean Hen]

Oh man is there a crap ton of ignorance in this post.

What tests are necessary in your book? Have you ever been referred for an MRI? Are you aware of the hoops you often have to go through to get one? I am.

What about testing costs before deductibles are met? I had a good friend who I helped get into recovery in January. The cost for a 28 day program was $36,000. He had a $6,000 deductible through his employer based plan.

Have a seat son. You’re way over your skis on this one.

CH isn't completely wrong. There are probably some risk averse doctors who order unnecessary tests. Are the doctors the only ones to blame? Or should we also place some blame on plaintiffs bar attorneys and litigious twats like donald trump who sue people at the drop of a hat?

I know, I know - tDS, tDS, tDS, blah, blah, blah.

Just based on my own experience when they tried to rush somebody in for a cardiac catheterization something just didn’t feel right…. The more questions you ask the more you learn and what I learned is a lot of doctors are full of shit.

If you have good insurance, be extra careful

By Dr. Evan, Levine, MD

Are some American hospitals risking the health and even the lives of their patients in order to garner greater profits? A recent review published in January, 2014, in a journal from the American Heart Association, of a database of diagnostic coronary angiography in New York State, strongly suggests they are.

It found that only 35% of all the coronary angiograms between 2010 and 2011, were definitely appropriate studies, while 25% were considered absolutely without merit. These mindboggling numbers should sound an alarm to anyone who has been scheduled for an angiogram, in any part of our country, and speaks volumes to issues I have been warning the public about since the publication of my book, What Your Doctor Won’t (or Can’t) Tell You, almost ten years ago.

[Caribbean Hen]

https://www.namd.org/journal-of-medicin ... dures.html

Tip of the iceberg especially in a totally corrupt state like NY

[Caribbean Hen]

“Once patients arrived at the Brooklyn Clinic, often without understanding why they had been referred to the practice, they underwent a series of diagnostic tests and follow-up office visits. These tests and office visits generally were not based on the patients’ actual treatment needs. Rather, MITTAL and others acting at his direction ordered these tests and office visits to create documentation sufficient to justify subjecting patients to unnecessary peripheral vascular interventional procedures—surgical procedures focused on clearing purported blockages in the blood vessels in patients’ legs. MITTAL directed others to, among other things, fabricate the descriptions of patients’ symptoms recorded in the practice’s office visit notes, varying the symptoms across patients so that it was not apparent that the symptoms were fake”

[Caribbean Hen]

It’s pennies on a hundred dollar bill but I’ll take it

“I have been working for years, literally years, to target welfare fraud — especially the fraudsters who conduct fraud in the name of deceased Americans,” Kennedy said. “In 2023 alone, for example, the federal government sent $1.3 billion — not million, billion. The federal government sent $1.3 billion to dead people.”

Senator Kennedy of Louisiana

Nobody better than this guy!

[Caribbean Hen]

For fiscal year 2025, the U.S. federal government collected approximately $5.2 trillion in revenue and spent $7.0 trillion, resulting in a deficit of $1.8 trillion.


1 trillion was spent was paying back interest on money the government had to borrow just to keep the government running

We need a Greta Thornburg type (hopefully a hottie) for the national debt as it is much more important than climate change

[UNI88]

[GannonFan]

That first chart is a good read, but the important parts are the year-on-year growth - that's where you can see the actual addition to the debt. For instance, you can see the last year of the Clinton Presidency where we actually had no growth of the debt with a balanced budget (result of Cold War peace dividend, bubble in stock market, pushback from Gingrich in Congress, and turning over economic decisions to Rubin). George W started having consistent, modest increases through his Presidency, and then finally one of the first big bumps at the end of his term as the housing bubble of 2008 came home to roost (not all his fault, mind you, but he deservedly gets a good share of the blame too). You really see the Obama years were almost consistently considerably large unbalanced budgets - didn't realize how much those were at the time. Trump's first term doesn't look rosy either, and then gets blown up even more by the COVID spending. What's really noticeable is how bad the Biden years were - even if you allow the first year to be COVID impacted, there's really no excuse for the rest of his term and the massive additions to the debt (modern monetary theory run amok). Surprisingly, the first year of the next Trump terms actually is a big reduction in the increase in the debt. We'll see if it continues in that direction for the rest of his term.

[Caribbean Hen]

TDS 88 forgot to mention that the Democrats shut down the Federal government because they wanted to spend even more…

This is what our government is doing to stay afloat

Obviously, we don’t have enough money to fund all of our obligations and other expenditures

The federal government asks foreign countries and investors for a loan and issues Treasuries that they have to pay back with interest

That interest on the money the government borrows is about 1 trillion a year or about 20% of the government‘s revenue

They have an auction for T bills and if they can’t sell all of them… no worries because the Fed steps in and buys the remaining Treasuries

The Fed pays for them by creating dollars just by a few computer clicks…. That’s right that government just creates money out of thin air.

If you think the answer is raising taxes, like the Democrats do …. think again. Just look at that broad network of scams that are going on in multiple states right now. This broad spectrum idea of scamming money is stealing from your tax dollars.

And to think this country was more alarmed about climate change. A narrative that they learned in school, the schools that don’t even teach the poor kids how to balance a checkbook do their tax return, or investing or how money even works. I know, we need to keep them stupid because the economy needs them to be

[BDKJMU]

Garbage #s from the usually wrong CBO. The CBO scores the BBB based on:
-A paltry 1.8% annual GDP growth rate over 10 years.
-Assumes static scoring with the 2017 tax cuts permanent. In other words, if tax rates are cut 10%, then automatically assumes the govt gets 10% less revenue, and vice versa. Which is of course garbage, because it doesn‘t take into account how increasing or decreasing rates effects the economy.
-Doesn‘t take into account tarriff revenue being brought in, which is currently massive.

BBB was signed into law end of 2nd qtr 2025. quarter 2025.
3rd qtr GDP growth: 4.4%, blowing away expectations.
4th qtr 2025 GDP growth rate estimate by Atlanta Fed 5.4%, which blows away expectations.
https://www.financialcontent.com/articl ... e_vignette
Just wait until the full effects of the BBB kick in by 2027-2028…