Denninger's follow up to

Vote For Trump, Go Broke, Or Die [Tump's Healthcare Plan]

Lack of competiveness and transparency in Medical Care and Drug pricing is one of Denninger's pet peeves. He's done a lot of research on the cost to US medical consumers.

Trump's Medical Plan, By The Numbers
2016-03-06 05:00 by Karl Denninger

Let's update one of my Tickers from a few years ago.

We're going to use official government figures here, ignoring, for now, the private sector.

The figures of note are the following (figures to the nearest billion), out of a total of $3,688 billion.

Military programs: $563 billion or 15%

Social Security Old Age: $741 billion or 20%

Social Security Disability: $146 billion or 4%

Medicare and Medicaid: $1,297 billion or 35% (Medicaid amounts to $350 billion granted to the States (no breakdown on what part is drugs), Medicare Part D (drugs) is $75 billion; the rest are clinical services for the most part -- hospitals and similar. S-CHIP, the children's portion, is $9 billion (insignificant) and administrative expenses are about $14 billion total, which is damned efficient -- only a bit over 1%)

VA (Veterans Health) approximately $61 billion or 1.7%

SNAP - food stamps -- is $104 billion and is up from last year, despite so-called "improvements" in the job market. TANF is a separate line item, $16 billion. Together, 3.3%.

That's where the money goes. Conflating Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid is the common horsecrap line run by both parties, but it's intentionally dishonest. Disability is a fraud-riddled mess, but the "old age" part of Social Security is neither going to bankrupt the nation nor is it an immediate budgetary problem.

But the $1,297 billion in Medicare and Medicaid is.

Now let's look at what Trump is proposing against this.

Price transparency in the pharmaceutical area alone would be a monster. Let's assume that of the $350 in Medicaid 10% is drugs. That makes drugs a roughly $110 billion annual federal expense.

What happens if you ban the gouging that is done today across the entire medical industry?

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http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=231191