You could say the same thing about any form of spending. Buy a beer and you have less money for sox.

Rebecca is writing about what the record shows to have been the case. She is only pointing out that more people, once things start o recover, start their spending for services and health care before moving on to other items later in the cycle.

For goodness sake get a grip. If people did not spend to much on cars houses and commercial real estate and sub-prime loans were not a problem then I’ve wasted an awful lot of time the past two years reading and trying to understand this stuff. Thank goodness I didn’t decide to study economics.

I wonder if Rosie could be enticed into setting up an on-line course? I guess we just need to read his letters.

Healthcare costs are shared by taxpayers, employers, and common people. It’s not a straightforward consumer spending issue. A lot of that money comes from employers and the government.

I think healthcare costs act like a tax on everyone and decrease their income for other types of spending. And if these costs increase too much, then this will damage the rest of the economy.

The problem with US healthcare is that it’s very inefficient compared to that of other developed countries. Canada for example spends a much smaller proportion of its GDP on healthcare than USA spend. And Canada’s population is healthier than that of USA in terms of life expectancy and infant mortality.

Inefficient and wasteful spending has never made people rich and never will. There is no way the healthcare industry can lead the US economy out of the recession. If anything, increased healthcare costs will likely drive the US economy deeper into recession. Because every other part of the US economy will decline from having their resources taken away in order to pay for more healthcare.