I want to play Devil’s Advocate for a moment. When I read the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ report on Consumer Expenditures (link here) I noticed something interesting.
To set the stage, we’ve all heard about how much individual consumer spending on healthcare is “out of control” and how it’s taking up an “unsustainable” amount of consumers’ paychecks. This squeeze on the average American’s wallet is one of the main reasons, assuming everyone’s being honest, that we are debating healthcare reform and the need for government intervention in what is described as a broken system.
But what if the numbers show that individual Americans spend almost as much on entertainment as they do on their healthcare?
That’s precisely what the Bureau of Labor Statistics 2008 report shows: that Americans allocate as much of their income to having fun as to taking care of themselves. Furthermore, the rate at which the spending is increasing is greater for entertainment: 5.1% to healthcare’s 4.3%.
This raises the tongue-in-cheek questions: do we need comprehensive entertainment reform to reign in these spiraling costs? Are we getting quality for our entertainment dollar? And do we need a public entertainment option to compete with private entertainment in order to keep it honest?
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Hey, Paisano -
Next you have to talk about all of the absurd/manifest lies in the assumptions on the obamacare bill. Like the huge cuts made to medicare reimbursements that are used for the financial modeling. If anyone thinks that that will come to pass, I have a bridge for them to stimulate. Then this thing you call a blog will get interesting.
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