Re: Trump in Nevada: 'I Love the Poorly Educated'
I always love how some people like to lay the blame of the '08 market crash at the feet of the Republicans - when the reality is that both sides of the aisle screwed the American public.
I worked in the legal side of the mortgage industry prior to and during this time. The cause of those problems are firmly rooted during Clinton's presidency when he signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley act. Yes, Gramm/Leach/Bliley were Republicans - however, this act was passed by both parties in both houses and signed by a Democratic President.
That act did a few horrible things. It removed the barriers that had been put in place to prevent banks from doing exactly what they ended up doing - combining consumer banking, investment banking and insurance into one.
The second thing that really kicked it into gear was the Community Reinvestment Act changes that all but forced banks to give low or no document loans to people. Ignoring their ability to repay those loans in an effort to help certain demographics buy a house. As usual with liberal policies, the very people they claimed to try and help were the ones hardest hit. By allowing people to obtain a mortgage with nothing more than their word, this increased the number of people in the market. Which, in turn, drove up home prices. Which, in turn, meant more creative ways had to be established to allow low income people to buy a house. Which led to a plethora of mortgage products that had no option but to default when home prices either stabilized or dropped. Even in 2002, we knew it was coming, it was only a matter of when.
Regarding the ACA, you have to understand the history of insurance and what the act utterly failed to accomplish in order to see why it was doomed to failure from day one.
Insurance was originally set up as a way to fix the income streams of doctors when the Great Depression hit and people stopped seeing their doctor as often. A group of doctors realized they weren't making as much money and needed a way to convince the public to keep paying them. So instead of paying the doctor for each visit, they'd just pay a small monthly fee. The effect was to change healthcare into a subscription style service.
This became it's own industry that grew outside the control of those original doctors rather quickly. Of course, as health care become more complicated, insurance companies did everything they could to divide up the market to reduce their expenditures while giving the appearance of coverage. If you think cell phone plans from 10 years ago were complicated, you should see the list of medical billing codes (CPT codes). You'd probably notice that even a blood draw has several different codes based on where the service is performed and the condition of the patient; and if you've ever billed an insurance company you'd know that depending on the company and even policy within that company a simple blood draw might, or might not, be covered based on the code used.
This leads to several problems. First, fraud is easy. So another industry is set up to detect medical billing fraud - increasing costs. Second, an insurance company can establish dozens of different plans where the various codes are cherry picked for "coverage" - a favorite thing to do among marketing folks which gives the end patient the illusion of choice. Third, a billing industry is established - also leading to increased costs by the doctors as navigating billing codes requires full time people. There are other issues - all of which drive up health care costs while giving insurance companies more control.
One of the the right answers in health care would have been to regulate the crap out of the billing procedures - forcing the insurance companies to do away with all the nuances. Instead, the ACA dialed up the confusion to 11. Ultimately leading to the average person paying far and away more on insurance than before - and getting far and away less because of it. The ACA needs to go away, I can only hope that whatever replaces it actually recognizes and addresses the root problems with health insurance.
Educate yourself. It's actually kinda important.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
