More Than Fifteen Million Unemployed Americans are not Recognized or Counted as Unemployed by the U.S. Government

Always multiply the main, most commonly reported "unemployment rate" in the US by two to get a conservative estimate of the real unemployment rate. Multiply by 2.2 to get a middle of the road estimate and multiply by 2.5 to get a high end but still reasonable estimate. You would have to multiply by 2.5, for example, if you wanted to include inmates who would not have committed crimes had they had a job at the time they ran afoul of the law.

That 50% unemployment for blacks in New York that Kay Johnson mentions in these comments must have been calculated in accordance with this calculation reality. Because of the way unemployment rates are falsely calculated, there never has and never will be an official 50% unemployment rate reported out for any group anywhere. The way the unemployment rate is cooked up, probably the highest possible official unemployment rate you could have for the US as a whole is roughly 12 percent (not far from the 10.2 percent that was actually reached recently) and the highest possible official overall or regional black unemployment rate you could possibly have would be roughly twice that (25%).

Note that the multipliers above apply to the current situation. Those multipliers will have to be gradually increased in the years ahead if the growth in jobs remains trivial or worse, because if so, the official unemployment rate will be more and more distorted downward.

Although people who read real news are generally aware that if you stop looking for work because you have concluded you most likely can't get one you are not counted as unemployed, what even they are not aware of is that once you have been unemployed for more than a year or two, you are generally not counted as unemployed even if you ARE actively looking for a job. The "actively looking for a job" thing applies, if not officially, certainly unofficially to only those who did have a job within the last year or two. At the very least, it can be said that the survey and statistical methods used preclude picking up as unemployed many and probably most of those who are actively looking for a job but who have not had a job for more than a year or two.

Furthermore, if you are self employed in any way shape or form (including even if your "business" loses money) you CAN NOT be counted as unemployed in the US even if you would much rather have a job and so you are actively looking for a job at the same time you are self employed. If you are “self employed” (and who isn’t who is “unemployed,” really?) you are BY RULE not counted as unemployed even if you make virtually no money from your self employment, or even if you lose money. This distortion is never ever mentioned even by all the “why the unemployment rate is much more than reported” articles.

The upshot of all of this is that the only real way to get at unemployment in the US is to look at the number of jobs (with any income or else above a certain pay level of your choice) and then divide that number into the number of people who you think in a perfect full employment economy would have a job (for example, say, 80% of those between the ages of 25 and 60). Then you would subtract that percentage ratio from 100% to get a real unemployment rate.

In practice, to save a lot of time you can use the multipliers or, better yet, you can get at real unemployment by using the employment to population ratio, which is, ironically, reported out monthly by Bureau of Labor Statistics itself. (Who would have known that BLS actually does have information with which the actual unemployment rate can be determined, laugh out loud?)

That ratio, expressed annually, declined sharply from a peak of 64.4 percent in 2000 to 59.2 percent in 2009. This means that 5.2% of the population (about one in twenty people) had a job in 2000 but did not have a job in 2009. The latest percentage reported is even worse, about 58%. Note that this methodology is excellent for tracking the real change in the labor market, although to use it to calculate a real unemployment rate would require you to estimate what percentage of the entire population would not need or be able to have a job even if jobs could be automatically obtained.

Then you would have to adjust the raw employment to population ratio accordingly. If you did that, you would probably arrive at a similar place as with the multiplier method: the employment to population ratio right now when those who definitely don’t need or can not have a job are removed from the population is roughly 78%, meaning that the real unemployment rate is roughly 22%.

In summary:

--58% of the population has a job
--20% of the population would not need or could not function on a job even if they could automatically get one. This would include true criminals and also self-employed who do better self employed than they could with a job.
--22% of the population is unemployed: they need a job and there is no job for them.

=================================
Someone begged to differ with the above overall, but he started off with an apparent agreement, which ironically I construed as a disagreement....

Unity Progress said:

Although people who read real news are generally aware that if you stop looking for work because you have concluded you most likely can't get one you are not counted as unemployed....

The Doubting Thomas said:

Correct, that's because you are not considered part of the work force if you don't have a job and are not looking for one.

Unity Progress:

And you are wrong. Most people are part of the work force whether they are looking for a job or not. Anyone who could theoretically work is part of the work force. People who are self employed are part of the work force; whether they are gainfully employed should be determined by whether and how much money they are making.

During World War Two and at the end of the First Great Depression, factory employers virtually came looking for people who were not actively "looking for a job" to work in the war factories.

Where is it written that people have to waste valuable time and money "looking for a job" that probably does not exist for them? Money and time spent looking for a job is money and time not available for self employment or for just enjoying life which, unlike "looking for a job," is free of charge.

What about people who don't have good clothes or who don't have transportation with which to "look for a job"? What about people whose teeth have rotted out because they can't afford dental care? Are they going to get a job after even a year of looking for a job? What about the millions of homeless people? What about people who have no phone service? Unless you toe the right wing line, all of these people are part of the work force.

The most well known requirements for being counted as unemployed are analogous to the requirements for voter registration. How so? Americans have been brainwashed into thinking that it is no big deal to have to register to vote in any way the local government sets up those requirements. And yet voter registration has been a perpetual source of opportunities for shady right wing operators to deny people the right to vote. In recent years brand new identification requirements have been added to the list of voting registration requirements in various states. People have lost their lives in disputes about and there have been numerous court cases over the years over the seemingly innocuous requirements that are actually sometimes onerous and not possible to meet requirements for voter registration.

Americans are conditioned to think that things such as voter registration and needing to look for a job to be counted as unemployed are no big deal, but unfortunately, they are a very big deal indeed when all of the facts and all of the diverse circumstances of real people are taken into consideration. In many other countries, voter registration is much more automatic than it is in the United States. Similarly, being counted as unemployed when you are unemployed is much more automatic than it is in the States.

The person who begged to differ was especially dubious of this line from my original:

What even they are not aware of is that once you have been unemployed for more than a year or two, you are generally not counted as unemployed even if you ARE actively looking for a job.

To which he said:

"I call BS. Where do you get this information and why do you think it's true?"

To which I responded:

In real life, anyone who has been unemployed for more than a year or two will have one or more of the following characteristics:

--They will be homeless, so there is no way they can be interviewed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to be counted as unemployed.

--They will not have a phone at all, so there is no way they can be interviewed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to be counted as unemployed.

--They will have a cell phone number only, which traditionally and so far as I know can still not be used by survey takers including BLS.

--They will have an internet phone number only, and such numbers are most definitely not used by survey takers including BLS.

--They will have joined the military and are not in any BLS classification. But clearly they are unemployed from the civilian labor force, or else employed with respect to the civilian plus military labor force combined, take your pick. They are not, as BLS claims, in no relationship whatsoever with respect to the labor force.

--They are in prison and are not in any BLS classification. But clearly they are unemployed from the civilian labor force.

--Anyone who works even an hour a week is counted as employed! As absurd as that is, it is literally true.

--Anyone who is self employed, who in other words has even the tiniest and/or the flimsiest of businesses, including one with no customers(!) is counted as outside the labor force, and so that person is not employed even if looking for a job while operating that business. The first question in the BLS unemployment survey is: “Does anyone in this household have a business or a farm?” If the answer is yes, than that person (or those persons) are not part of the universe from which employed and unemployed is calculated.

--All persons who did at least 15 hours of unpaid work in a family-owned enterprise operated by someone in their household are classified as employed, even though they made no money!

--All persons who were temporarily absent from their regular jobs because of illness, vacation, bad weather, industrial dispute, or various personal reasons, whether or not they were paid for the time off, are classified as employed!

--Certain ways of looking for a job don't count as looking for a job according to BLS. Only certain, traditional kinds of "active job search" qualifies an unemployed person for being declared to be and counted as unemployed. According to BLS, “passive methods of job search do not have the potential to result in a job offer and therefore do not qualify as active job search methods. Examples of passive methods include attending a job training program or course, or merely reading about job openings that are posted in newspapers or on the Internet.”

And even this is not a complete list of people who are unemployed but are not counted as unemployed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The list of loopholes, of categories of people who are unemployed but are not counted that way goes on and on and on. A certain number of unemployed people commit suicide every year due to the many ravages caused by unemployment.

A very substantial percentage (very possibly a majority) of those suicides are not even considered to be unemployed by the Government. In other words, there are people every year who lose their lives due to a condition that the Government does not even recognize as having affected them!

The BLS page for this matter is here: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm
You will see that this page covers most of the above loopholes if you take the time to read it through.

The BLS itself publishes more expansive measures than the “official unemployment rate” that is reported by the Corporate Media, but even the most expansive one leaves several of the loopholes above intact.


The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.

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There is no Evidence That Obama"s "Rube Goldberg Care" Will Improve Things

Editorial Notes: The following was written on March 27 and not posted until now (May 27). Beginning April 15, 2010, Unity-Progress will post anything new we do here first and then later "cross post" at CommonDreams.org if and only if:

(a) There is a relevant article at Common Dreams under which the item can be posted and
(b) I think of cross posting and take the time to do that. I will not cross post everything nor even necessarily the majority of what goes here.

In other words, beginning immediately Unity Progress gets first priority, the automatic tie-in between Common Dreams and Unity is repealed, and therefore the miserable pattern of late postings at Unity will end. None of this is meant to state or imply that I think anything less of Common Dreams, which I continue to look at as the best progressive Site on the Internet. I'm just expanding from the roots, so to speak.

This site will only very seldom show up in Google Search results. If you don't want to lose track of this site, you need to bookmark this site in some way.

====================================================

Are they gone yet? I mean the special event guests of Common Dreams stopping by to brow beat and chest pound against the unreformed commies here at Common Dreams, the one and only site among sites with comments and some traffic that I know of that was overwhelmingly against Obama and Big Insurance' Rube Goldberg Care from day one. Firedoglake has been almost as resolute and you have to love Jane Hamsher over there, but even Firedoglake also has a disturbing number of Daily Kos and similar refugees with minds that seem to be seriously watered down by pro Obama corporate mush from the campaign and the early months of Lord Obama’s reign over the peasantry.

No, having read most of the comments, the special guests are thinning out but they are not quite completely gone yet. I see they are still posting their “but it’s better than what we had” and “how can you be so mean as to deny coverage to women and children due to preexisting conditions” riffs. Um, we don’t deny health care to anyone with our plan, not to mention that we don’t even need greedy, monopolistic, health care denying health insurance companies to run our plan. So get a clue before you try the equivalent of lecturing Einstein on physics.

We want our plan which is by far the best plan; we don't want no new plan at all.

Specifically to our guests: first, what is so complicated about understanding that some people will be hurt and some people will be helped by all the new laws? At this time, we can’t say exactly how many will be hurt and exactly how many will be helped, but it is a definite certainty (and admitted up front by the Democrats and the Congressional Budget Office) that there will be large numbers of both.

But is it normal or “to be expected” that major new laws benefit and hurt large (and different) groups of people? Yes, it is normal, that is, it’s normal if you are talking about a third world country! (As examples, removal of food import tariffs in Haiti or privatizations of water in various remote South and Central American countries come to mind.)

But on the good side of town, in the advanced countries, many of which you find in Europe and some of which you find in East Asia, virtually all major new laws benefit many more people than they harm. There are never large groups of people threatening to take up arms against Internal Revenue in those countries, no sir. And in those countries, there’s no “Well, in the years ahead, we’ll just have to keep track of the millions who are helped and the millions who are hurt and then about twenty years from now we’ll know whether the huge new law was a net benefit or a net loss for the citizens.

But it’s going to be a real nail biter. Dan Rather is saying it’s going to be tighter than a tick on a hog on a hot summer day. Laugh out loud. No, in the reputable and credible countries, they know for an absolute fact that the vast majority of people will be helped by major new laws before they even think of passing them. Whereas in the US, both the Democrats and the Republicans recklessly pass laws that are in effect and in part experiments to find out just how many peasants are hurt and just how many are helped.

And whereas, by contrast we know for an absolute fact that various types of single payer based systems work very well for decade after decade because we have more than enough evidence for that from numerous countries throughout the world. Whereas, we have no evidence whatsoever at the moment as to whether Obama's Rube Goldberg Care will work well.

And it almost goes without saying (but I’ve learned from experience you should say most of the “goes without sayings”) that no country other than the United States would seriously consider what actually just passed in the US, a particularly obnoxious, dangerous, and ironic combination of regressive taxation, restrictions on health care freedom, cuts to existing programs, and on the plus side curtailments of many of the most egregious violations of humanity of health insurance companies. ("Whew, that was one whopper of a price paid to stop pre-existing condition and rescission. I can’t imagine what the price the peasants will have to pay if WellPoint and the rest are to be forbidden from being monopolies! I think the peasants will be wearing togas and eating worms from the back yard if we go for anti-trust reform or the public option, so we better stop now.")

Second, what is so complicated about understanding that only in Wonderland can you look at the health care effects only while ignoring the effects on jobs and the economy as a whole? If the new laws prevent the labor market from recovering (to whatever extent it could without those laws which even I would say has to be to some extent) then Obama and company will be responsible for the worst and most reckless economic mismanagement since the Hoover and those who in 1935 and 1936 told Franklin Roosevelt that the Depression was over and it was time to get back to fiscal discipline (which resulted in many more Depression years featuring an extremely low stock market and many more years of additional job losses and lack of new jobs). Obama and company are gambling with the economy in general and with the job market in particular (not that they really care about your job or anyone else's job) but as I already implied, at least historians, who are sort of a “Super CBO,” will care.

Later, Dreamers.

A long discussion was generated by this intentionally provocative article. (Is anything I write not "intentionally provocative," laugh out loud?) Both the original article and the discussion about the article and about my response to the article (above) are here.

Here is by far my favorite among the postings in the discussion generated by my posting:

ardent1 March 28th, 2010 11:07 am
Look, Scott. I think that you are simply playing deaf. Obama called this an 'health care insurance reform' and though that is partially incorrect since it really doesn't even reform the insurance racket, at least it gets it right about this not even being any reform of health care itself. Don't you get it? I don't want health insurance but want health care coverage. The two are not the same at all, Dude! 'Your' insurance will not get you health care coverage much of the time. Your money (lots of it if you have that) will though, since 'care' has been made into a commodity by the US government controlled by the Big Business community.

Even with health care coverage in this country, you get an abomination and Obama and the Democrats don't even pretend to address that. For one example... do you really want the government to put you into a Big Business run 'nursing home' in a box when you get older? Do you really want the government to guarantee that you be 'treated' (tortured) to death if, God forbid, you came down with incurable cancer? The medical community in the US has no standards hardly, since the care given to you is seen as a commodity on a profit making assembly line. You get about as much quality control as a hamburger does at Wendy's on that assembly line.

Public community health does not exist in the US. It was all privatized and mainly disassembled decades ago. You have the CDC when you really need sick leave guaranteed to sick workers now having to work for minimum wage while ill. You have Planned Parenthood (maybe?) instead of single payer for all health issues being available. There are so many issues here that would fall under real health care reform. However we are talking only about what Obama calls only semi-correctly as 'health insurance reform'. Yes, it is about health insurance. No it is not a reform of even that, but a forced bailout of this racket to be paid for by those who hardly ever benefit form the so-called care that will then be DOLED out to some of them ONLY.

You want to believe in this 'reform' more than a Jesus Freak wants to believe in 'salvation' through Jesus. We just aren't buying your religion though no matter how starry eyed and vacant faced you get about it. Sorry... There just is no Obama, Pal. There just is no 'reform' being made. This plan is a deform of a deformity, not a reform. Get it yet?

To answer your question of .... "Do you think keeping the current healthcare system in place would provide you with better care and benefits than the reform?'

Yes actually I do. I think that from having next to nothing guaranteed by the current situation, that now I will actually have to pay for that next to nothing even more than I already do because of this Deform legislation put into motion by the Democrats. That's sad but exactly how I see the sad situation unfolding. It is a proposal designed to allow the current disintegration of Health Care to hold together by threads yet still longer, by victimizing the working poor even more! How sick is that, Scott?

'If you do, I hope you are wrong. I find it hard to believe so many people know exactly how this all is going to unfold.'

Well nobody does, least of all yourself, Scott. But I think that it is easy to see that the Democrats have advanced nothing of this cause for any of us Working Class folk. Why should they? They are a corporate made party made for the corporate class to act against the rest of us. You don't seem to get that though? This is deform legislation made to help the insurance business stay in operation at our expense.

Both the original article and the discussion about the article and about my response to the article (which is above) are here.

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Sign Your Health Insurance Policy Contract with a Gold Pen or you will be out of Place

The three most basic reasons why the concept of insurance is not appropriate for financing health care are:

(1) Insurance is for things that are not supposed to happen, seldom happen, and rather often never happen to individuals in a lifetime. But health care is inevitable and therefore insurance is not by itself an appropriate funding mechanism for health care. The vast majority of people need health care during their lives at some point, usually due to both one or more accidents and to one or more sicknesses. Even if you live and die without ever getting sick or getting injured, you are still by rights supposed to get preventive care such as annual or biannual check-ups.

(2) Insurance was invented as a luxury product for wealthy people. The real purpose of insurance was and still is to protect most of the wealth of well off families if they happen to suffer a major misfortune or two. To this day, insurance has not really lost its' association with the high income and high wealth population. Simply because of the nature of and the mathematics of wealth itself, insurance is much less valuable to those who are not well off than it is to the well off.

Quite frankly, lower income and lower wealth people who "load up" on insurance are rightly regarded as kind of foolish by most financial people in the know, and even by insurance sellers themselves, who if they are honest at least caution people of lesser means to avoid going overboard on buying insurance that they can not afford and/or that will not prevent them from becoming impoverished if and when misfortune strikes.

(3) Health insurance in the US, to anyone who is neither relatively poor nor very rich, is an absolute necessity since health care itself is an absolute necessity unless you want to take risks of dying young. The health insurance industry therefore has a captive market, which gives them far more power with which to charge higher prices and with which to dictate fine print terms in contracts in their favor.

But during the 20th century, in the most economically successful countries, things which people desperately need were gradually removed from the vagaries and ravages of the private sector and into the public sector. It was more and more understood in the successful and well off countries that people should not be at the mercy of private, profit-making companies always free to just say no (and free to go out of business) for things which everyone perceives that people absolutely have to have.

America, however, much more so than other countries, resisted the trend over the decades of the 20th century. While between 1900 and 1980 other countries were making utilities such as electricity and local bus service public, the U.S. resisted, although certainly not entirely. For example, even in the U.S., the interstate highway system built starting in the 1950's was considered a public enterprise.

But in the late 1970's, in much of the world the winds shifted against the common good in favor of private interests. The well off moved to take control of things. In the last 30 years, while the US became a very right wing economy indeed and moved to privatize enterprises among its relatively small number of them, the countries with the most public enterprises (such as in Europe) reduced them but certainly did not eliminate them entirely or renounce the concept the way the US did.

This is the context or background for the scrapping of for profit insurance companies in favor of public financing of health care in most of the world outside the US. There were ebbs and flows between public and private world wide, and in some places the common good made much more headway than in others. But while most of the rest of the world accepted the concept that health care (and certain other absolute necessities) are not appropriate for the private, profit making market because for one thing people are absolutely desperate for the product, the U.S. never accepted the concept and, indeed, didn't much accept it for anything else.

ORIGIN OF INSURANCE
Insurance companies began about 1680 (about 330 years ago) in England and the first policies insured ships, which were about the most expensive things in existence at the time, especially considering that England was at that time in its' fairly lucrative mercantile and colonial era. Obviously, it was well off people who owned the ships.

One of the most well known insurance companies has always been and is still today Lloyd's of London. This company was founded in 1689 by a group of men who met in Lloyd’s coffee house in London, and originally sold only ship insurance. From its' inception right on down to today, Lloyd's of London has specialized in offering insurance products which are customized to the needs of the well off and of well capitalized businesses. Give credit where credit is due: Lloyd’s is one insurance company that doesn’t very much try to turn a buck by selling insurance to less well off people who will really not benefit from it.

In the United States, the first insurance policies were offered in the early 1860’s, when the Civil War was raging. Obviously, well off people in both the North and the South were worried about losing what they owned directly or indirectly due to the War, so the concept of insurance was, under duress, imported from Mother England despite the fact that, overall, both the American political and the American economics systems were clean breaks and fresh starts from those of England. Note that for about 85 years after the Declaration of Independence, America got along just fine with no insurance industry at all.

Just as in England 170 years earlier, insurance in the States started out as a product exclusively for well off individuals (and businesses owned and operated by those individuals) to insure against losses associated with very, very expensive things. Of course, insurance of various types gradually became more and more popular in the 20th century in America. But in the first half of the 20th century, insurance was sold mostly to wealthy people and to businesses mostly owned by relatively wealthy people.

Insurance was the type of product that was and still is seemingly custom designed for enterprising or conniving sales people to sell to those who were worried about this, that, and the other thing. And to those who are worried about financially "keeping up with the Jones'". More broadly, insurance turned out to be one of the mainstays of the great American commercialization and industrialization from 1860 on.

Eventually, along about 1950, banks granting mortgages required all “homeowners” with mortgages to carry house insurance. Similarly, virtually all of the states eventually required those to whom drivers’ licenses were issued to carry liability car insurance, which can pay for damages caused by the driver.

So during the 20th century, insurance began to be sold more and more to people not so financially well off. When after and due to Franklin Delano Roosevelt the American middle class grew by leaps and bounds, the insurance industry, armed with more and more types of insurance products and with more and more and ever niftier sales pitches, pursued this vast new market without hesitation. Since during the 20th century the American middle class had its' apex, the insurance industry naturally penetrated this class of the population so that it could vastly increase its' sales.

Thus by the late 20th century, insurance was as much an everyday industry among large sectors of the American population as is food sold at the grocery store.

And yet insurance was and is still, well, insurance. Legally it hasn’t really changed much from 17th century England. The problem is that insurance as a product is at heart still far more appropriate for the wealthy than it is for the non-wealthy. When a wealthy person has a misfortune and files a claim with his insurance company, he or she has plenty of money to pay all of the deductibles, co-pays, and uncovered items associated with the claim. In fact, the wealthy person often technically has enough money to pay for the entire misfortune lock, stock, and barrel, but that could make that wealthy person not wealthy anymore, thus the need for the insurance. Again, the objective of insurance was and still ultimately is primarily to keep wealthy people wealthy, not exactly as wealthy as they were before the misfortune, but almost as wealthy as they were.

But when a non-wealthy person who happens to have an insurance policy files a claim, he or she can become destitute even if the insurance company honors both the spirit and all of the fine print of the contract. We have seen this in the massive number of medical bankruptcies filed by those with health insurance policies that have occurred in recent decades in the States.

With the new health insurance laws, we will continue to see large number of medical bankruptcies in the future in the United States, although many of them will be disguised for political reasons as old fashioned "the debtor made bad decisions" bankruptcies.

Under the Democrats' unconstitutional health insurance laws, people who think they can but really can not afford premiums and all of the other less talked about health insurance expenses that come up from actual claims (deductibles, co-pays, disallowed items, uncovered items, prescription drugs, vision care, dental care, etc.) will end up in bankruptcy court. Meanwhile though, other, wealthier people will avoid bankruptcy thanks to the new health insurance laws, because for example they really need health insurance but they were denied it prior to the new laws due to a preexisting condition.

This is why we have already stated in a previous article that bankruptcy is "moving down the income scale". The total number of medical bankruptcies will neither greatly fall nor greatly increase due to Obama Care, but the income and wealth of the bankrupts under Obama Care will be lower than it was before. The gap between assets and liabilities among the bankrupts will be lower than before due to the subsidies and due to new annual “out of pocket” limitations.

The annual out of pocket limit regulations in the new laws do take direct aim at bankruptcies, but will not help one iota those who “live paycheck to paycheck” and so don’t have $5,000 or $10,000 or $20,000 lying around to cover the amount they are supposed to pay for the deductible, the co-pays, the prescription drugs, and the uncovered items. Ironically, a much higher percentage of Americans live paycheck to paycheck than do people in other countries who don’t have to worry about any of the things we are discussing because their health care expenses are taken care of completely (or at least virtually completely) by the general tax system of the country they are living in (which is the core idea behind “single payer” financing of health care).

If you wanted to be crass about it, I guess you could say that thanks to the Democrats, medical bankruptcy is moving to the "bad neighborhood" where the rest of the bankruptcy family lives, laugh out loud. In other words, the Democrats’ unconstitutional health insurance laws are all about moving medical bankruptcy to what is in their view its’ rightful address on the wrong side of the tracks.

It is interesting to note that in the final days before passage, the Democrats who were the most insistent that the new laws be passed despite heavy opposition often brought up the notion that people who refused to buy grossly overpriced insurance simply because it is unaffordable were freeloading. The freeloaders were getting care in emergency rooms effectively almost for free. This is known as uncompensated care, the cost of which is partly passed on in the form of health insurance premium hikes but is also partly absorbed by the commons.

But the Democrats are all about supporting wealthier people these days, so unlike Democrats of decades ago these Democrats were disgusted with common people trying to “freeload” off the wealthier. So there was an undercurrent of disdain and disgust toward the common people freeloaders, who of course are merely innocent bystanders to the US health system wreckage in general and to unaffordable health insurance in particular.

Not only will the Democrats' unconstitutional health insurance laws move bankruptcy to (in the view of the Democrats) back to where it belongs on the income and wealth scale, but the new laws will also remind us over and over again in the years ahead that insurance is not a fully appropriate concept for those who are not above average in wealth and income (before any misfortunes strike). Because despite having insurance (that they were bribed to buy with subsidies and prodded to buy under threat of tax penalties) people with lower incomes and little wealth will be going bankrupt right and left under Obama Care when they discover the hard way what the wealthy already know: that insurance certainly can not and will not pay for everything, and when misfortune strikes you will take a hit despite having insurance.

Unlike the wealthy, if you are lower down the income and wealth scales, you won't be able to take the financial hit that comes despite the insurance and financially live to tell about it. That "hit despite insurance" is relatively small to a wealthy or to a high income person but hardly so for others. So if you are induced to buy health insurance and then you can’t cover all the things that the insurance won’t cover, it will be off to bankruptcy court for you to file an "Obama Care bankruptcy". There may be a waiting list, so get your bankruptcy filing in early, please.

Remember, if you do buy health insurance, make sure you are wearing expensive, formal attire and have a gold pen when you sign your policy contract. Otherwise, you will look like a fish out of water.

By the way, did you know that bankruptcy has become so commonplace that you can largely do it on the Internet with no attorney?

READING LIST
Wall Street loots Birmingham

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