Well, if it’s not, it should be because it’s been a foregone conclusion that squeezing the consumer is the answer most popular with lawmakers and industry.
If consumers want to look at a positive graph, a rosy picture, they can look at amounts charged overall by healthcare providers of all sorts over the past few years, profitability of medical device makers over the past few years, or insurance company profitability.
These positive outlooks along with how well the rich are doing stand in stark contrast to graphs indicating consumer income overall in the past few years, consumer costs for health insurance over the past few years, and dropping utilization rates (indicating people visiting physicians among poor people has dropped, fewer doctor’s visits, fewer emergency room visits {you can look at CDC reports of consumer utilization rates for 2011 for more detailed information}).
Now with little fanfare, the IRS has finalized a medical device tax of 2.3 percent that must be paid by device makers on their gross sales and consumers no doubt will have that cost passed onto them. Little consumer response flooded airwaves about that little bit of tax news released on December 5th. Perhaps because the non-public sector is getting smart, we’re realizing that regardless of politics, we are the go-to pocketbook for both parties.
While the President is expert at cost shifting and redistribution, the Republicans are expert at proposing that government should be minimized unless it’s being used for their pet projects and policies designed to protect the rich in supposed support of the false promise (false based on experience and fact) that they’re the job creators who will solve the unemployment problems facing our nation.
Both arguments are the same, the middle class should support a party’s efforts to rescue a different economic class or segment of society in the hopes that ultimately the middle class will benefit through trickle-up or trickle-down economics, both of which have not worked for at least a decade.
Beyond the verbiage spewed from the rich talking heads of cable news channels as confederates of one or the other of the dominant parties, or of the infantile proclamations of government representatives or the President himself of how reasonable they’re being and how it’s the other party’s fault, citizens recognize that the non-public sector middle class remains the pocketbook for government.
Are there still things middle class Americans can do that might positively impact the non-public sector middle class? Yes. The middle class can formulate, devise and establish group pressure as the American majority supporting policies that matter to the middle class.
For instance, bothering our representatives to take stronger action and support more prosecution of insurance fraud, including fraud in government insurance plans such as Medicare that are estimated in the billions of dollars and are conservatively guessed at amounting to at least seven percent of the amount of money spent on Medicare and Medicaid.
Supporting healthcare providers who accept our insurance and calling out insurance plans that provide insufficient numbers of healthcare providers as participating providers under their insurance plans requiring us to spend more out of pocket to be able to see a qualified healthcare provider in a timely fashion.
Consumers should support maintaining our health to the best of our ability without accepting a label that any consumer’s personal health behaviors or age somehow created the billion-dollar-problems in the healthcare industry.
Consumers should support candidates who work at and mirror our views with expert understanding instead of those who use reams of statistical twists and turns to justify a mean-spirited or simply easy solution to get elected.
Consumers should never accept threats as a justification for giving in whether it’s the threat that doctors won’t practice medicine or that social programs will go away because those threats are like any other ransom and are rarely satisfied with a single occurrence. If we give in to the threats of today, we prepare to give into the threats of tomorrow. It is cowardice, not compromise and certainly not a spirit of joint responsibility.
As consumers we have never had more power because there is incontrovertible evidence that the American non-public sector middle class is under attack, as a group and that is where our potential strength is for being a vehicle of positive change rather than a tool for a particular candidate, business or enterprise.
