Just an idle thought, and perhaps such a resource is readily available. But, it occurs to me that it might be useful if the State or some other entity made a target household budget with “reasonable” expenditures for common categories, perhaps based on income. What should a family of x people spend on groceries in a given week? What portion of income is reasonable to allot to transportation? Health care? Heating? Clothing? Entertainment? Etc.
It might provide a useful planning tool that would let people know generally whether their expenditures are way out of line and will likely be able to find savings in that category or whether their expenditures are unremarkable for that category.
Doesn’t the Census do something like this already? I’m too tired (read: lazy) to look it up now, but I thought they did something like this to determine where the poverty line should be drawn.
Possible. Seems like a simple thing, but I’ve never seen anything like “A family of four should expect to spend $x on food for a week.”
You lost them at “should expect to spend”.
You would have to do this calculation to figure out many things, and I’m sure it has been done.
However, it seems like political suicide to tell people how much they should spend on things.
Sure, we can tell them they should exercise or not do illegal drugs. Telling people not to spend money is VERY un-American.
After all, our economy has been built on everyone (government, companies, and families) going into debt. Once we stop doing that, we’ll have another depression. This stuff we’ve been going through is kids stuff.
What I would like to hear examined from different points of view is what a family of 4 with varying incomes can expect to buy in the way of health insurance. Or what does a typical lower middle class family income of $30,000 a year salary allow in health insurance, considering what else a family has to buy? Most free market advocates present this scenario as everyone being ‘free’ to ‘choose’ whatever they ‘want’.
In my parents’ age, and in my youth, health insurance wasn’t so much an issue because if you worked ,you got more or else adequate insurance. That’s my hazy recollection anyway.
The government (the USDA, specifically) does provide budget guidance as it comes to food: the “Thrifty”, Moderate-Cost and Liberal-Cost Food Plans. Food stamp allocation is based on the Thrifty plan.
To provide guidance in other areas, it would have to be tailored to different areas of the country, where costs of living vary greatly (SO glad I live in Indiana!)- and it’d be nice if they raised the minimum wage to match, to actually be a living wage, once a reasonable budget was determined.
The problem also becomes how you define “reasonable.” Is cable tv a reasonable expense? All right, how many channels? Does a family of four need three bedrooms?… then we start getting into the hazy realm of how many Viagera tablets a man can reasonably receive every month…
I don’t think most people think about the cost of health insurance correctly. They are generally looking at the cost to them personally which is high enough. But that is the tip of a very large iceberg. My total family plan, which I think is typical, costs $17,000 a year. This totals more than I have deducted for everything else combined. That money is considered by your employer as a part of your overall compensation. Essentially you are paying the whole amount. I am not a huge fan of a government takeover of anything but Dr. Phil might say of the cost of the current system, “How’s that working for you?” Incidentally, the health insurance payment by my employer represents additional income that McCain has proposed to tax.
Tying health insurance to employment is a relic. At some point, it made sense because of World War II wage freezes, I guess. But, currently, the two things should be disassociated.
In my mind, there is a strong case for universal payer or some other significant government interference for a couple of reasons. First of all, health care isn’t very susceptible to certain important market principles. It’s hard to act rationally when there is essentially a gun to your head and/or the clock is about to run down. “Sorry Mom, I know the doctor says you need it right now or you’ll die, but we haven’t had time to comparison shop, so we’ll just have to take a pass.”
Second of all, we’re usually not committed to just letting people die if they can’t come up with the money, so we end up treating the poor anyway, only in a horribly inefficient manner — maybe we want to play chicken for awhile to see if we can scare the money out of the person who isn’t paying for their health care?
Third, insurance is a way of pooling risk. If ultimately we’re going to pay for treatment for everyone anyway, we probably ought to put everyone in the risk pool and come up with a rational way to pay for it up front.
The way we currently do it, as I understand it, is we let insurance companies cherry pick the most desirable population — those with money to pay premiums and no glaring health risks. The insurers manage this population with a bunch of money going to advertising, paying profits to shareholders and management, and battalions of paper pushers.
Next we have a variety of people under government insurance of one flavor or another – Medicare, Medicaid, government employees, each with different rules, premiums, and paperwork.
Finally, we have uninsured who can sometimes pay out of pocket but often get served but can’t pay and are subsidized one way or another by the other pools.
We’re paying for universal health care. We just aren’t getting it.
Jason at Four Square Sixty-Six had a great post a while back about shared risk. He works for a large firm, so risk is shared widely, so the special needs of his child don’t drive up collective policies all that much. His wife used to work at a smaller company (maybe still does?) and a co-worker had a special needs child, and his bills drove up people’s premiums.
I don’t pretend to have answers for the abortion debate, but I do believe that people are short-sighted when they work for an end to abortion and over-look what happens after birth, starting with health insurance.