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March
13
2019

Shoot Now Or Be Shoved In The Oven
Karl Denninger

The title of this article is not hyperbole.

Gene Sperling was just on CNBC saying that health care must be treated as a right and essentially deferring the debate as to how to pay for all of that -- and of course he trotted out the trope of a kid born with severe disabilities bankrupting his or her parents.

Health care is, today, almost 20% of our economy.  One dollar in five.

80% of that is stolen through fraud, felony, extortion, racketeering and anti-trust.  All of these are illegal and in the case of anti-trust have been illegal for almost 100 years.  There have been no changes to 15 USC Chapter 1 exempting medical providers, pharmaceutical firms or others involved in the supply of drugs, devices, implements, supplies and services to these laws.

Twice various elements of the medical monopolists and insurance firms have gone to the US Supreme Court challenging said laws.  They lost both cases, with the latter being in the early 1980s.

Having lost twice in trying to get legal exemptions for their conduct these industries turned to bribing politicians and issuing tropes like Gene just ran in the national media, asserting that it's a "right" not to be bankrupted because you give birth to a severely-deformed or disabled child, and as a result everyone's health care, from birth to death, is a fundamental right you can extract by force from others.

Gene is not some random idiot.  He has been Director of the National Economic Council and an assistant to the President for economic policy under two administrations -- Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

He is 60 years old -- not much older than I.

And if this crap does not stop right here and now by politically shooting people, rendering them pariahs in society and removing their bull**** from the political stage millions of Americans are going to die in the same sort of horrible way that the Jews did in Auschwitz -- either by being literally shot, shoved into boxcars and then ovens or by writhing in pain when the government collapses under its own fiscal weight and the entirety of the US medical system comes down and is burnt to the ground with it.

Gene does not give a flying **** about any of this because he considers himself to be an "elite" and "protected"; indeed he has just five short years before he believes he can steal all the health care he wants, irrespective of his personal decisions, from you, I and everyone else.

Unfortunately you can't print health care with the press of a button.  You can print paper or electronic dollars but not goods and services; that is, actual value.  You cannot compel a nurse to attend you or a doctor to perform surgery.

Competition and technology makes everything cheaper in real terms over time.  Gene knows this is an economic fact as he's an economist.  It is the very definition of the word "productivity"; doing more with less.

Yet despite one of the greatest bursts of productivity the world has ever seen over the last 50 years health care has gone from 3-4% of GDP to almost 20%, a five-fold increase in allocation in the economy -- or put it another way health care has seen an 80% regression in productivity per unit of expense.

The only reason this sort of outrageous regression has ever happened in the history of the economic world is fraud, extortion, racketeering and monopolization. It was that very recognition by Congress that led to the passage of 15 United States Code.  That law has been on the books for nearly one hundred years and so stands today yet not one prosecutor will or has empaneled a Grand Jury, subpoenaed all of said records from the medical systems under their jurisdiction and returned true bills against every single hospital system, insurer, pharmaceutical company, distributor and officer of same, including individual physicians, all of whom can be trivially demonstrated to have colluded to fix prices and restrain trade.

At the same time we have enabled and cheered on all manner of intentionally self-destructive behavior that has increased the utilization of said goods and services to an enormous degree.  We have sold to the American Public an intentionally false model of what to eat.  We have affirmed "healthy at any size" tropes that are knowing lies and directly cause chronic, painful and expensive diseases.  We have run further tropes that extraordinarily high-risk behaviors, such as men screwing each other up the ass, are a fundamental human right for which others must pay all associated medical costs.  We have tried to tell the military that people who enlist with the specific goal of having a quarter million dollars of voluntary surgery done because they are unhappy with being born with a pair of testicles is not only their right but it is someone else's duty to pay for it.  And we have allowed so-called social media and political police to enforce your silent acceptance of all of those tropes lest you be attacked professionally, socially and in some cases physically.

Through all of this we have refused to hold a single health care or insurance company executive accountable for behavior that we criminalized at a felony, prison-sentence earning level nearly one hundred years ago.  We permit people to be charged 2, 5, 10 or even 100 or more times what someone else is charged for the exact same thing five minutes earlier or later in the exact same facility.  We allow "gag clauses" that prohibit anyone from discovering this garbage and we refuse to prosecute this behavior despite it being declared feloniously illegal as an obvious, transparent attempt to fix prices more than 100 years ago.

It is entirely possible to take hundreds of billions of dollars every single year out of the federal budget alone right now by simply refusing to spend one penny of public funds for treatment of one condition where the person involved insists on continuing behavior that have been scientifically proved to make said condition progressively worse every single time.  Yet not only do we refuse to take that simple and effective step Gene wishes to have the US Government declare intentionally killing yourself slowly and miserably while racking up a million dollar bill someone else has to pay a constitutionally-protected human right.

This crap and the tropes run by those who egg on this garbage must stop right damn now.

We do not have decades or more to "bend the curve."  Almost all of the Federal Debt exists on the books today as a direct consequence of the very policies that Gene has egged on from his time in the Clinton Administration forward.  If it is not stopped nowwithin the next few years the Federal, State and Local governments will be unable to continue to fund this garbage in the debt markets and the economy, government and our civilization will collapse.

We can, today, politically shoot every single one of these people and demand Grand Juries across the nation -- federal and state -- be empaneled and start indicting every damned one of the jackasses that is destroying the budget and our nation.

Doing so is both legal and necessary.  As a pleasant side effect of such action doing so will make the entire debate about "pre-existing conditions" and "health insurance" unnecessary since virtually everyone will be able to simply pay in cash.

If we do not do so right here, right now, today then the sort of shooting that will remain available in just a few short years will only be the sort done through various and very illegal forms of violence and it will be served upon us whether we want it or not.  Not ten years from now, not 20, not "sometime next century" -- before the end of the next Presidential term.

THAT'S THE MATH FOLKS

Virtually all of those who are currently or do become dependent on said tropes and their promoters will die horribly, either from violence as society self-destructs or, perhaps worse, slowly, painfully and inexorably as their so-called "right" to medical care runs up against the reality that there is no money to pay for it and no way to compel anyone to deliver it.

 


 

Mr. Denninger, recent author of the book Leverage: How Cheap Money Will Destroy the World, is the former CEO of MCSNet, a regional Chicago area networking and Internet company that operated from 1987 to 1998. MCSNet was proud to offer several "firsts" in the Internet Service space, including integral customer-specified spam filtering for all customers and the first virtual web server available to the general public. Mr. Denninger's other accomplishments include the design and construction of regional and national IP-based networks and development of electronic conferencing software reaching back to the 1980s.

He has been a full-time trader since 1998, author of The Market Ticker, a daily market commentary, and operator of TickerForum, an online trading community, both since 2007.

Mr. Denninger received the 2008 Reed Irvine Accuracy In Media Award for Grassroots Journalism for his coverage of the 2008 market meltdown.

 

 

 

market-ticker.org

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