If I were a betting man, I would bet that Omaha will be among the first to emerge [from the recession].

- The Brookings Institute’s Alan Berube in the North Platte Telegraph

Image Credit:  BehaviorGap.com

Charles Hugh Smith – The expansion of health insurance and government entitlements created “free money” and thus the explosion of healthcare costs.  The solution is simple and “impossible”: we all pay cash.

Here’s why healthcare (a.k.a. sick-care) costs cannot be reduced; the entire system is based on vast pools of “free money.”  The corporate-America or union/government employee who goes to the doctor pays a few dollars for a visit and drugs; the “real cost” is of no concern.  Ditto the “real costs” charged to Medicare and Medicaid.

The link between the “consumer” of healthcare and the provider has been broken for decades.   There is no “free market” in healthcare–there isn’t any market at all.  We live in a Kafka-esque nightmare system in which “some are more equal than others” and hundreds of thousands of dollars are lavished on worthless tests, procedures and medications for two reasons:

1.  because there’s “free money” to pay the bills

2.  so-called “defensive medicine” in which worthless tests are administrated to stave off random (sometimes valid, sometimes nuisance) malpractice lawsuits.

There is a solution so simple and so radical that it is “impossible” (and of course you’re reading it here): shut down insurance and all government entitlements, and return to the “golden era” of the 1950s when everyone paid cash for healthcare.

Read the remainder of the article here.

Brian Wesbury and Bob Stein, both economists at First Trust, offer outlook on a few key economic topics.  Here’s a handful of grafs I’ve pulled from their recent article that you won’t hear from the media establishment:

• New home sales have risen for five straight months.  Existing home sales are up in four of the last five months – and given strong figures on pending home sales in August – should be up substantially in September.  After declining for 39 straight months, private construction of new homes increased for the third straight month in August.  Meanwhile, home inventories are falling and given the low level of construction will continue to do so in the months ahead.
• On consumer confidence, the small decline in September followed a large increase in August.  And now that private-sector wages and salaries are starting to rise again, we think consumer optimism will start to trump pessimism in the months ahead.
• On auto sales, everyone knew auto sales in July/August were artificially high due to “cash for clunkers” and September would show a large drop.  The only issue was how deep the drop would be.  Though the September drop was larger than anticipated, we take this as a sign that a greater share of the sales that the clunkers law robbed from future months came out of September, meaning October and beyond will show less of a “clunkers” effect and higher rates of sales.
• On the employment situation, we like to focus on what’s happening in the private sector.  Private payrolls fell 210,000 in September, a bit larger than the 182,000 decline in August.  But this happened back in June when payrolls fell 391,000, a bigger drop than in May when they fell 292,000.  Stocks weakened on the June jobs report, but then strengthened as corporate profits showed larger than expected gains and economic data continued to improve.