{"id":32772,"date":"2012-11-11T02:02:50","date_gmt":"2012-11-11T06:02:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=32772"},"modified":"2012-11-10T20:56:47","modified_gmt":"2012-11-11T00:56:47","slug":"and-in-other-depressing-economic-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=32772","title":{"rendered":"Speaking of Depressing Economic News . . ."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>. . . it appears that now <a href=\"http:\/\/cnsnews.com\/news\/article\/record-704-million-enrolled-medicaid-2011-1-out-every-5-americans\">approximately 22% of the US population is enrolled in Medicaid<\/a>.\u00a0 Not Medi<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">care<\/span> \u2013 <em>Medicaid<\/em>.\u00a0 That\u2019s the joint Federal-state program for the indigent.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, you read that right.\u00a0 More than 1 out of 5 people living in the US are getting their healthcare paid for courtesy of the US taxpayer because they&#8217;re considered &#8220;indigent&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>That comes to roughly 70.4 million individuals.\u00a0 Oh, \u00a0and did I mention that the definition of \u201cindigent\u201d for Medicaid purposes gets significantly easier to meet in 2014 \u2013 when the earning threshold for qualification goes from poverty level to 133% of poverty level?<\/p>\n<p>Sadly, that\u2019s not the whole story.\u00a0 Add Medicare recipients who are not indigent, and I\u2019d guess the total today is over 100 million people who are getting their healthcare paid for courtesy of Uncle Sam as an unearned entitlement.\u00a0 (In 2010 approximately 27.5 million of the 47+ million Medicare enrollees were above poverty level and thus did not qualify for Medicaid.)<\/p>\n<p>Why is this bad? Just remember economics in 9 words &#8211; TANSTAAFL.\u00a0 And I don\u2019t think I have to tell you who\u2019s picking up the bill for all of this.<\/p>\n<p>If you\u2019ve got any doubts, remember the above when the next round of Federal and state tax hikes hits.\u00a0 Because mark my words \u2013 another round of tax hikes is coming.<\/p>\n<p>And when those tax hikes hit, there&#8217;s a good chance it won&#8217;t only be psychologically depressing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>. . . it appears that now approximately 22% of the US population is enrolled in &hellip; <a title=\"Speaking of Depressing Economic News . . .\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=32772\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Speaking of Depressing Economic News . . .<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":623,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/623"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32772\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}