Paul Rosenberg: Enshrining the Lies of the US' 1%
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/12/2011122994027989871.html
The reason for that cost structure is non-competitive private oligopolies - insurance companies, drug companies, hospital chains, etc., - in sharp contrast to other countries with their government-run systems of various different kinds. There's another name for these oligopolies -they are the cash cows of the one per cent. Paul Ryan is their man, and PolitiFact is part of their protection system.
Indeed, as Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson explained just over a year ago, in their paper "A World Upside Down? Deficit Fantasies in the Great Recession", all of the US long-term federal debt is due to just three oligopoly sectors: the military-industrial complex (the backbone of empire, with bases all around the world and almost half the world's military spending), the medical-industrial complex (with twice the per capita costs of other systems), and the financial sector (which has recently cost trillions of dollars in lost wealth and economic activity).
All three of these are enormous cash cows for the onr per cent, and equally enormous cost-centres for the 99 per cent. Without the costs imposed by lack of competition, regulation and accountability in these sectors, the US would have no long-term debt problem. We would be paying it down, rather than running it up.
'Pants on fire'
This connects with yet another Paul Ryan "pants on fire" lie: that his budget plan is what it claims to be - a deficit reduction plan. It's not. In the next decade - the maximum time-frame in which budget projections are normally done - the Ryan Plan produces just $55bn in deficit reduction over the next 10 years, according to an analysis from the Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities. This is because $4.2tn in tax cuts (heavily tilted toward the rich) almost entirely offsets $4.3tn in spending cuts (largely targeting low- and middle-income Americans).