I saw Gov. DeSantis on Fox the other day and I could immediately tell that he’s most definitely presidential material. He was calm, cool, and appeared very focused on his mission as governor. Florida being the strongest red state in the union right now is certainly a plus for him. It also helps that Florida under Gov. DeSantis’ leadership has handled the virus much better than most other states its size. He properly protected its most vulnerable population living in nursing homes without imposing draconian lockdown measures on the rest of the population. Which is the exact opposite of what New York governor Cuomo did to his state’s population. This means a great deal given that New York is the biggest and bluest blue state in the union, second only to California. Trump hanging out in Florida is a plus for him for the same reasons that it’s a plus for Desantis. But the most Trump can do for Republicans these days is be their unofficial godfather. He is too toxic and too washed up to do anything else for them. This’ll make the Dems green with envy given that their unofficial godperson is crotchety old hag Hillary. I suppose that Obama could be their unofficial godfather, but racial tensions will likely become so heated up by 2024 that he’ll become a huge liability for the Dems. At least that’s what I hope will happen. My hope is that all the Dem’s anti-white woke stuff will become so harmful to whites that most, if not all, white Dems will associate the stuff will Obama, thus causing them to leave the Democratic Party in droves! Discrimination against blacks is racist, discrimination against whites is equally racist. Dems are simply too dim to see this!

Well, if the Pentagonal powers-that-be are gonna get rid of extremists, they should do so from both ends of the political spectrum. If they don’t, if they get rid of right-wing extremists without also getting rid of left-wing extremists, then all political power will be left exclusively in the hands of the Left. Which I suspect is their goal. Actually, that’s the Left’s goal. The Left is just using the Pentagon is achieve this goal. More specifically, the Left’s goal is to have a single party government with a leftist agenda. But since the so-called “Left” doesn’t have a real leftist agenda, it’s better to describe the Left as fake leftists with a fake leftist agenda. Granted, the real Left might also be angling for a single party government. But that’s beside the point, given that the Right, real or otherwise, could also be angling for this as well. At any rate, what the real and fake Left do share is common is that they’re both built on Marxist thought. Unlike real leftists, though, fake leftists have put a postmodern spin on Marxism. In other words, both real and fake leftists are Marxists, but real leftist have maintained some degree of rational and objective thought, which is the antithesis of postmodern thought, BTW. And since identity politics emerged from postmodern thought, this explains why identify politics is anything but rational and objective, at least when it’s based on race. Which is the case when it comes to fake leftist politics. Now if identity politics were based on class, instead of on race, as would be the case if real leftists had most of the power in DC and in society at large, the power structure would be disrupted in such a way as to allow those who are NOT at the top to benefit from it as well. By contrast, fake leftists wants to keep the existing power structure intact but replace some who are at the top with so-called “people of color.” Which is why if a conflict were to occur within the Pentagon, it’ll be a race-based conflict. Actually, such a conflict between the races would also occur in all areas of society as well — from schools and neighborhoods to places of work and leisure. Thinking more broadly about this, if a war were to breakout in the country at large, it’ll be a all-out race war, no doubt. At that point, the blame for the entire destruction of America can be squarely pinned on the fake Left!

No, I’m not Cynthia Ann. I used to blog quite a bit at Moon of Alabama and Naked Capitalism, but not so much anymore. That’s how I found out about your site. Plus I have been following many of the writers on antiwar.com for many, many years, that’s where I also heard about you.

Needless to say, the news media has wrongly turned this whole event into a black vs white thing. If anything, it is a cop vs people thing minus any mention of skin color. And in all honesty, though, it should be reported as nothing more than a single cop-gone-rogue kind of thing — a single bad apple among many good ones, if we will. But by framing the whole event as though it were an all-cop thing against an all-black kind of thing, the news media is potentially putting more lives at risk on both sides of the fence, particularly on the white side of the fence. And because they invariably side with blacks over whites, we will start seeing more violent crimes and blatant acts of discrimination against not only white cops, but also white people as a whole as well. In fact, as a white in a predominantly black work environment, I’m being discriminated against on a daily basis. I can tolerate that, and I have for many years, but what I won’t be able to tolerate is becoming a victim of some sort of black-on-white crime. Furthermore, as a frontline nurse who often has to deal with angry and violent behavior, I deeply empathize with any cop on the frontlines who too has to deal with such dangerous and scary behavior as well, which no doubt occurs much more often and at a greater level of intensity in their particular line of work. So if a cop is put in a position where he can’t do his job enforcing the law and protecting the public out of fear that if he does, he is likely to be reprimanded, fired or even put in jail, no cop, especially a white cop, will want to join the police force. That’s largely how we got into a nursing shortage. Keep in mind, there is no shortage at all of nurses who do back office or armchair work, but there is a severe shortage of them who do frontline work, especially in acute care settings. That has a lot to do with the fact that nurses are put in a no-win situation when dealing with angry and violent behavior. Either they have the choice of getting reprimanded, if not fired, for defending themselves or getting injuries or even killed for not defending themselves. The same will become true for frontline cops in the post-“George Floyd “ era of law forcement, I’m afraid. But it’ll be much worse for them given that the anger and violence they’ll confront will also entail a weapon or two. At least patients and visitors are screened for weapons prior to entering a hospital. OTOH, there’s no way to screen criminals and other unsavory characters on the street for weapons prior to confronting them.

A. Pols, Because of all this inner city violence directed against anything and everything white, I no longer regret moving out of my lovely turn-of-the-century house in the inner city of Birmingham and moving into a brand new home in the inner suburbs. Then again, it helps that I transformed my new home both inside and out into a place with just as much historical charm and beauty as the hundred-year-old, Craftsman-style bungalow that I previously owned in Birmingham. Where I now live, the city major is white and the city council is mostly white. There are a few blacks in my inner-suburban city, but that number pales in comparison to the rather huge number of them just to the north of me in Birmingham; thus, I feel quite safely insulated from all this pent-up hate and potential violence by blacks against whites. Needless to say, I can sleep much better at night than I would if I still had a home in Birmingham. Regardless of that, I wonder if the statue of Charles Linn, a sea captain in the Civil War who later became the city founder, will be replaced by someone similar to him but who’s black instead. My guess it’ll be someone like the first black and former longtime major of the city, Richard Arrington Jr. There are already several streets and buildings named after him, but he still doesn’t rise to the same level of prominence that Charles Linn did. Such details, though, don’t matter at all to these crazy, dumb-down rioters as long as a statue of a white guy is no longer in the park. And since the park was named after Charles Linn as well, I guess that its name will also have to be changed, which means that they’ll name it too after a black guy, maybe even George Floyd. Nothing would surprise me when white-hating blacks are on a radical mission to revise history in their favor. The crazy, anti-white bigots also took down an eight-foot statue of Thomas Jefferson in Linn Park as well. I suppose they did this because he owned black slaves. Never mind that his slaves were sold into slavery by fellow blacks in Africa prior to being shipped to the New World. The black mayor of BIrmingham would undoubtedly refer to this as “revisionist history,” as he has done on other occasions in order to play up the black victimhood narrative. What he is really trying to do is selectively remove any events from American history, past to present, that make whites look good and blacks look less than good.

The problem is that truth has become lies and lies have become truth on the blue side of things, Colonel Lang. And as long as all the self-hating whites on the blue team keep giving into BLM/ANTIFA and their anti-white demands, not to mention all their endless lies about how whites are putting down blacks in every way imaginable, whites will continue to lose ground in terms of job and educational opportunities, as well as political power in all levels of government. Government will then demand that schools and businesses add yet even more overpaid and underworked “diversity” leaders and experts to their payroll whose sole purpose is to make certain that blacks are given preferential treatment over whites when it involves money and power in the workplace. And because “diversity” has become exclusively synonymous with being black, diversity of thoughts and ideas will get sent to the back of the bus, resulting in a workplace that is less competent, innovative and productive and more entrenched in terms of cronyism and corruption. Consequently, the so-called “Peter Principle” will become the law of the land in government, schools and workplaces across the US. Furthermore, the regulatory burden already plaguing both the private and public sector will only get worse, causing our competitive advantage in world to dip down even further. In other words, if China or even Russia replaces the US as the leading superpower in the world, we can put the blame squarely on the stupid, brainwashed self-hating whites and their BLM/ANTIFA partners in crime! At any rate, the future looks awfully bleak for anyone who is white in America. It is also looking equally bleak for anyone who is looking for more diversity of thoughts and ideas at places of work, learning and government and who doesn’t want to see us overtaken in terms of wealth and power in the world.

Something that's rarely ever mentioned by the news media is the fact that the survey company Press Ganey deserves much of the blame for the opioid addiction problem in this country. They, along with the corrupt hospital regulatory agency Joint Commission, lobbied hard to have patient satisfaction factored into Medicare reimbursement. And some of their most important survey questions ask about pain management. It asks whether or not the doctor prescribed enough pain meds to relief your pain, and whether or not the nurse gave you your pain meds in a timely fashion. These questions may seem rather harmless, and some may even see this as a win for patient advocacy, but it's really not on either account. Doctors on the frontlines, as well as nurses on the frontlines, including myself, have been warning for years that such survey questions will help fuel an opioid epidemic in this country. Press Ganey balked at this, including Joint Commission and Medicare. But, hey, this should surprise no one. After all, all three of them are in a revolving door together, getting rich off of Uncle Sam. So as Press Ganey goes from being a mere million dollar company to a monstrous billion dollar company, think of all the massive amounts of money they have made by helping to get millions of Americans addicted to narcotics. If I personally had any kind of power in Washington, I'd push hard to have Press Ganey handover a sizable portion of their profits selling surveys to hospitals and put it to use treating opioid addiction across this country!

You are assuming that providers wield more power than insurers do. I don't believe this is the case, Eric. There has been a lot more consolidation the insurance industry than in the hospital industry. No doubt that this has given insurers the upper-hand over providers. But even if private insurers don't wield enough power to cut ER reimbursements, or any reimbursements for that matter, the federal government can. It's worth noting that nearly half of all healthcare dollars now come from the federal government. Maybe you're unaware, but 1 in 3 Californians is now on Medicaid. When all 50 states get on board to expand Medicare, and with Hillary as president this is likely to happen, 1 in 3 Americans will be on Medicaid. This is why Medicaid has become a cash cow for insurers. As you mentioned below, insurers are losing money on managing ObamaCare plans, which, BTW, is somewhat irrelevant given that the number of people on ObamaCare, especially the ones that are subsidy free, is a drop in the bucket compared to the number of people on Medicaid. However, they are making up for these losses, minor though they are, by making a lot of money on managing Medicaid plans. Economy of scale can work wonders on your profit margins. Speaking of profit margins, hospitals are known for having razor thin profit margins. Much of this is due to their high labor costs. But as I mentioned before, an increasingly higher portion of their labor costs is due to bureaucratic bloat. If hospitals would cut the number of beancounters and paper-pushers in the back office, their profit margins would fatten up in no time, and without compromising care one bit. Then they will have enough padding to withstand ER reimbursement cuts. Needless to say, though, hospitals can't reduce bureaucratic bloat until we get healthcare reform that discourages bureaucratic bloat. But we can't do that until we shut down the revolving door healthcare bureaucrats in Washington and healthcare bureaucrats in the hospital industry. Hopefully a Trump presidency can do that.

Amir, You can blame drug-seekers coming into the ER to get their "dilaudid high" on the healthcare bureaucrats in Washington. First they made the mistake of making pain the "fifth vital sign." Then they came up with ridiculous idea to reimburse hospitals and other providers based on how well that treat pain. And no one can figure out why opioid addiction has reach epidemic proportions in the US! Connecting the dots could never be easier. But nothing is gonna be done to correct this problem until the revolving door between the healthcare bureaucrats in Washington and the healthcare entrepreneurs in the private sector is shut down, for good. For instance, the company that came up with the patient satisfaction survey, which includes lots of pain management questions, lobbied to have their survey results tied to reimbursement. So doctors and nurses know that if they don't give drug- seekers the "dilaudid high" that they want and crave, they are likely to get a poor patient satisfaction survey, and thus, in turn, get a lower reimbursement from private insurers, as well as from Medicaid and Medicare. Nevertheless, I still will argue that bureaucratic bloat is the biggest yet least talk about problem facing healthcare. And it's only gotten worse under ObamaCare. Prior to ObamaCare, there were roughly 10 back-office administrators for every doctor employed in the hospital. Now, thanks to ObamaCare, there are roughly 16 back-office administrators for every doctor employed in the hospital. This wouldn't 't be such a problem if somehow all these employees in the back office did something to improve quality of care or reduce hospital readmissions. But that's not the case. Far from it. Quality of care has only gone down and hospital readmissions have only gone up since the passage of ObamaCare. No doubt that ObamaCare has become a jobs program for the US. Which is largely why the Obama Administration doesn't want to do anything to reduce all the bureaucratic bloat plaguing healthcare. If they do, US employment numbers would drop, making the president's record on employment look worse than it already is. But if the Obama Administration wants to be honest with the American people, they would openly admit that all of this bureaucratic bloat in healthcare is putting a drain on the rest of the economy. Simply put, no nation can have a vibrant, sustainable economy and compete successfully in the global market when healthcare is parasitically consuming an ever-increasing share of its GDP. The Obama Administration needs to come clean on this, even if it means death to ObamaCare.

It's a bit more complicated than that, Tyler. People with "Cadillac" plans and people on Medicaid and Medicare don't have any incentive to not use the ER as a primary care clinic. Then again, they don't deserve all the blame for this. There are not enough primary care physicians to take care of their minor or even their chronic, yet minor healthcare problems -- things like a diabetic with high blood sugar or or a CHF patient in fluid overlaid. This problem is made worse by the fact that most primary care physicians won't work after hours, holidays and weekends. Why do you think ERs are the busiest after 5pm, and on holidays and weekends? My solution to this, at least in the short term, is to reimburse minor ailments in the ER at a lower rate. All medical ailments, from a simple rash to a major heart attack, are already coded for reimbursement purposes. Just divide these ailments into minor, major, and all else in between, and reimburse them accordingly. This would significantly bring down ER costs without compromising care. In the meantime, we can work towards increasing the number of primary care physicians. But that gonna take time -- years, in fact -- which is why I recommend developing a more affordable way to treat primary care problems in the ER, knowing that this is a just a temporary fix.

There are several reasons why ERs are being overused, Tyler. Profit motive is the number one reason. Insurers reimburse ER visits at a much higher rate than they do primary care visits. Which explains why hospitals are expanded their ER services to include freestanding ERs. In the past three years, for instance, the hospitals in my town alone have build three freestanding ERs. Insurers can put a stop to this very expensive way to deliver care by simply cutting reimbursement for ER visits that are obviously not an emergency -- things like a sore throat or a bellyache. But they have yet to do that. The only thing they have done to discourage people from using the ER as a primary care clinic is up the deductible for ER visits. I have private health insurance through my employer and my deductible for ER visits has increased from $50 to $150, while my deductible for a primary care visit has remained the same at $20. But people with a so-called " Cadillac plan" still have a very low deductible for ER visits, and people on Medicaid or Medicare pay next to nothing to be seen in the ER. Neither of them have the incentive to stay out of the ER. And I don't see that changing anytime soon. People with " Cadillac plans" and people on Medicaid and Medicare are are too politically connected to see their ER deductibles increases to, say, $150. But it doesn't do much good to cut ER services when there are not enough primary care physicians to pick up the slack. Then again, even if we had an adequate supply of primary physicians, many of them won't see patients after hours, holidays and weekends. What attracts doctors to go into primary care is not the money, it's the hours. If that "perk" is taken away from them, they will demand more pay. Which leads me back to what I regard as the best way to solve the ER overuse problem. It is not to reduce their use, but to reduce their costs. And the best way to do that is for insurers to reduce reimbursement for ER visits that are clearly not an emergency.

In a strange sort of way, ObamaCare parallels that of ZIRP/QE. ZIRP/QE has made the financial economy very wealthy with very little of that wealth making its way down to the real economy. Similarly, ObamaCare has made the back-office economy very wealth with very little of that wealth making its way down to the front-line economy. Even though the financial economy isn't exactly like the back-office economy and the real economy isn't exactly like the front-line economy, there are enough parallels between the two to make the case that the ObamaCare is profoundly bad for the real economy, the place where the front-line economy is found. Perhaps if the critics of ObamaCare would focus their criticism on the fact that ObamaCare enriches the back-office economy at the expense to the front-line economy, they would make better progress towards discrediting ObamaCare. After all, it's not very hard to make the case that the back-office bureaucrats have little to nothing to do with delivering patient care, much less improving patient care, and the more money is thrown at these bureaucrats, the less money there is to delivery care on the front lines, causing the quality of care to erode even further.

In the event of nuclear war, three things will survive with certainty -- cockroaches, banksters and fruit cake. Merry x-mas and peace to all of you here at Mark's place.

I have no illusions about the Democrats, Ron. I know they are bought-and-paid-for corporatists no different from the Republicans. And I have suspected for quite some time that ObamaCare didn't just emerge out of nowhere. Since you traced its roots back to Reagan, then this probably explains why Obama regards Reagan as his hero. I guess that means that ObamaCare should be renamed ReaganCare. Oh boy, that would get the baggers all fired up! Despite that, I still wish that healthcare would reverse course, a 180-degree turn in fact, shifting it back to the people. Socialism for the people is a lot more appealing to me than socialism for corporations, and it should be for most. Don't mistaken me, for the most part, I have nothing against corporations per se as long as they operate efficiently and contain overhead costs. But I am very much against the government subsidizing corporations. To me, this is what causes them to become highly inefficient and generate excessive overhead costs. But the problem is that if we take the subsidies away from healthcare corporations, very few people will be able to afford healthcare. So what do we do to fix this unaffordability problem plaguing healthcare? We can either keep the profit motive in healthcare in place and remove all government subsidies going to corporate healthcare, thus making people pay for most of their healthcare out of their own pocket, reserving health insurance only for catastrophic care. But this isn't realistic at all. Or, OTOH, we can do the more realistic thing, which is to ditch the profit motive in healthcare all together and ramp up government subsidies to the utter max, thus replacing the system we presently have with some sort of version of a single payer system. Needless to say, by keeping the profit motive in healthcare firmly in place while still generously subsidizing corporate healthcare is what's artificially causing healthcare costs to be much higher than they really ought to be. Let me also add that ObamaCare is largely popular among the masses due to the generous subsidies it provides to the lower-middle working class and the essentially free care it provides through Medicaid expansion to the working poor. Upwards of about 85% of all individuals who purchase health insurance through ObamaCare are getting it subsidized and roughly 70 million Americans are now covered under Medicaid. They got a great deal, and they are totally happy about it. But anyone who's having to pay full freight for health insurance through ObamaCare is getting a raw deal, and they have a right to be extremely unhappy about it. But since they are clearly in the minority, making up less than 15% of all ObamaCare consumers, they and those who stand up for them, people such as myself, are wrongly viewed as irrational troublemakers. But why should it be that people who are simply unfortunate enough not to have generous health insurance through their employer, be it public or private, bear most of the burden of Obamacare? It's just not fair that people who are bearing the burden of ObamaCare the most are doing so only because they lack the political clout to have the healthcare law postponed, less alone changed, in their favor. This lead me to point out the winners and the losers of ObamaCare. The winners are the individuals who qualify for expanded Medicaid and subsidized health insurance, the people who benefits from all the bureaucracy generated by ObamaCare, and the healthcare corporations who get to socialize their losses and private their profits, making them fabulously wealth on the backs of the taxpayers. Besides the taxpayers, the other ObamaCare losers are the individuals who are having to pay full freight for health insurance, and the front-line caregivers, doctors and nurses alike, who are taken on a larger and larger patient load, all because the bureaucratic burden created by ObamaCare is consuming an increasingly disproportionate share of available healthcare dollars. Needless to say, when caregivers lose out, patients lose out as well. The bond between caregivers and patients is too strong to totally disregard the cause and effect relationship between the two. You can't say the same about the bureaucrats in the back office as they relate to patients.

What ObamaCare has done is take our healthcare system and turn it into the medical equivalent of the military-industrial complex. Even though the medical-industrial complex existed to a certain extent prior to ObamaCare, Obamacare has morphed it into something that rivals that of the military-industrial complex.

If there are any hospitals going out of business, they are in rural areas. There are various reasons for this. Many rural hospitals lack the patient population to support them or lack the skilled doctors and nurses to staff them. Many of them are also independent entities, meaning they are not part of the hospital plutocracy. It's very hard for any hospital to survive in the ObamaCare World without being part of the ObamaCare-driven, medical-industrial complex. Though I do know of some rural hospitals in my state that are doing quite well, in fact very well, despite not having the skilled staff and the advanced technologies to make them attractive to patients. That's because they have the political clout to call the shots when it comes to being reimbursed by Medicaid and Medicare. Political clout allows a select group of rural hospitals to get away with overcharging Medicare and Medicaid. They strong-arm government bureaucrats into giving them more than their fair share of Medicare and Medicaid dollars. Think of this particular group of hospitals as an organized crime unit that operates outside of the ObamaCare racketeering machine, enabling them to be propped up with profits courtesy of Uncle Sam. What's especially egregious about these profitable rural hospitals is that many of them provide third world medicine. Believe me, you wouldn't want to check into one of these hospitals, especially if you are having a heart attack or stroke. If you do, you'll die. Which is why these hospitals should die as well. There's a rural hospital that's quite profitable just 40 miles from my house that lacks a ventilator. That mean that if you respiratory arrest at that hospital, you die. How any hospital that doesn't have a ventilator on site can get away with calling itself a hospital, much less be allowed to remain profitable, is way beyond me. The only way to make sense of this is think of these hospitals as being connected to the mob, backed up by corrupt government officials.

Most of us were aware that shortly after the financial meltdown of 2008, schools and law enforcement received a great deal of stimulus money from the federal government, most of which has now dried up. However, very few of us were aware that large hospital systems, public and private alike, were also getting an enormous amount of fiscal stimulus money as well. Then with the passage of ObamaCare, federal stimulus money allocated to large hospital systems intensified, by leaps and bounds. One example among many is that hospitals were given roughly $30 billion in federal grant money to purchase new medical software under the mandated “meaningful use” provisions of ObamaCare. Stuff like this explains why the healthcare sector has out performed all other sectors trading on Wall Street by a long shot. ObamaCare hasn't made the healthcare industry fabulously wealthy because it has introduced more market-based medicine into the system. No, the healthcare industry has become fabulously wealthy because ObamaCare has introduced more corporate socialism into the system. Neal Patterson, the guy who started Cerner, the company which my hospital purchased its medical software from, came from being less than a millionaire to an outright billionaire faster than Mark Zuckerberg did with his launching of Facebook! Besides the huge age difference, the only other difference between Patterson and Zuckerberg is that unlike Zuckerberg, Patterson got his billions by profiting off the government. Don't get me wrong, my hospital needed new software. But that's nothing new. Every business needs to buy new software from time to time, in order to stay competitive and up to date. But no business should be given billions in government handouts to pay for IT software, or any other capital expenditures for that matter. And how much good has Cerner software done to improve patient care or improve hospital efficiency? I would say not much good at all. Oh sure, it has created more good paying jobs in the hospital's IT department. But because hospital budgets are finite, the more hospitals spend on IT, the less money they have to spend on direct patient care. I work in direct patient care and my patient load is at an all-time high and the amount of time I spend plugging in data behind a computer is also at an all-time high. In other words, the ObamaCare stimulus has enriched healthcare IT, but has done so at the expense to patient care, as well as to hospital efficiency. Unfortunately, hospitals aren't taking this stimulus money to build the "New Deal" equivalent of roads, bridges and dams. They instead are taking this money to do the "New Deal" equivalent of digging ditches and refilling them back in again. I could provide many other examples of bastardized neo-Keynesian projects taking place throughout hospitals, but I don't have the time or space to do so right now.

A 25 basis point move, even 50, would have no material impact on the real economy. It will only impact market psychology that the Fed won't bailout the banks and Wall Street every time their core businesses show the slightest weakness. The real economy does not need rates at zero to 1/2 of a percent to function. Perhaps it is time for you to understand that the real economy has very little to do with the banks and Wall Street.

This entire stock market bubble has been created, sustained and even promoted by the arrogant Federal Reserve. They used QE and ZIRP "schemes" to prop up insolvent Wall Street banks, enrich corporate executives, and produce the appearance of a recovering economy. Now a third huge FED induced bubble has popped since 2000. That's all the FED knows to do is blow and pop bubbles. What a scam they run.

The Fed actually needs to raise rates to chase some of that hot money out of the market and back into the real economy. A nominal increase will not hurt the economy, but it will send a signal that the Fed sponsored carry trade is over.

In 2000 and 2008, the Fed burst the bubble by raising rates between 8 and 17 times respectively to pop the stock market and real estate bubble. This time, the Fed hasn't raised rates once. If a recession hits, it's QE4 to the rescue. They have no other bullets, the main reason they wanted to raise rates in the first place was to reload. Too late!

I agree with Roger on this one. There won't be a rate hike. The FED policy right now is best for the banksters and that is whom they work for. Stealing from the elderly savers to give to the banksters is just too good a gig to end.

If the economy, which we've been told for years now is strong and humming along, cannot handle a measly .25% hike in interest rates, then I believe the economy is the joke many have been saying, propped up with smoke and mirrors.

Here's an interesting article that I believe is well worth reading, and it's not from Yahoo news either, Rusty ;~) "The Corporate Bond Market Foreshadowed a Stock-Market Rout" http://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-sector-foreshadowed-a-bloodbath-in-stocks-2015-08-25 [Come to think of it, I distinctly remember hearing that prior to the 2008 meltdown, bond spreads widened out big time while equity volatility, i.e. the VIX index, remained relatively calm. This occurred several months prior to the VIX surging to record highs. If you had waited until the VIX surged prior to the meltdown, you wouldn't have had enough time to exit the stock market without racking up huge losses. But if you knew about bond spreads widened out and how that combined with a relatively calm VIX foreshadows a meltdown in the stock market, you would have had plenty of time to exit the stock market with minimal losses. The lesson here is that if you want to foresee either a major correction or a major crash in the stock market, monitor bond spreads as they relate to the VIX. And if monitoring this is too time consuming or too overwhelming for you, hook up with some friends in the bond market that'll do it for you. ;~)]

The only reason health insurers have more customers is because most of them are receiving huge federal subsidies to purchase their insurance plans. I read somewhere, though I don't recall exactly where, that over 75% of all insurance plans purchased through ObamaCare are being subsidized by the taxpayer. Take away these subsidies and most of these plans will be dropped. That's one way to take the obscene profits away from the health insurance industry. This will also have the added effect of making heath insurance much more affordable for the average customer, which will ultimately result in lower healthcare costs for everyone. More free care through Medicaid on top of subsidized care through ObamaCare is the driving force behind higher healthcare costs. Anytime the government, especially at the federal level, subsidizes the cost of just about any kind of service on a grand scale, the cost of that service artificially goes up. You first saw this happen in the military-industrial complex, then it began to happen in the education-industrial complex, and now it's starting to happen in the medical-industrial complex. This is why anyone who opposes the military-industrial complex should also oppose ObamaCare.