The BBC reports on the intelligence of the wealthy: Top investors ‘hit by $50bn con’

Some of the world’s wealthiest private and corporate investors are reported to be victims of an alleged $50bn fraud by Wall Street broker Bernard Madoff.

Mr Madoff is alleged to have confessed to a huge Ponzi scheme fraud.

I think think the situation is summed up in the title of one of my favorite W.C. Fields movies: You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man.

These are the people who received all of those tax cuts to finance the growth in the economy, and they threw the money down a Black Hole in the hope of making unrealistic profits. “If the claims are too good to be true, they probably aren’t.” That is part of every presentation on financial fraud given somewhere almost every day at senior centers all over the country.  Apparently the police fraud units need to start giving them at country clubs because the obscenely wealthy aren’t very bright.

Everyone would have been better off if we had increased taxes on the upper brackets as we could have increased the number of homeless shelters and food stamps for the formerly wealthy.  As they have never paid withholding taxes, we don’t have to worry about them being a drag on Social Security and Medicare.

I was talking to neighbor and we got into a discussion of Single-payer, Medicare for All, when I realized that people don’t seem to be aware that almost of the insurance policies that even people without health insurance have include medical payments.

Your car insurance pays for accident injuries.  The personal liability section of your home owners insurance covers people injured on your property.  Workmans Comp covers medical costs.  All of these policies cover medical costs, they are just the costs of other people.

The significance of this is that in countries that have universal health care coverage all of these insurance policies are cheaper, because they don’t have to cover the cost of medical care.

Think about an accident that injures a worker at a fast food restaurant.  Which is more expensive: the worker’s wages or that visit to the emergency room?  A lot of workmans comp claims would never be filed  if we had Single-payer because it would be easier to just keep the worker on the clock and let him/her go for treatment.  Under the current system the claim has to be filed because it is often the only way of paying for the treatment.

This is just another way that Single-payer is cheaper than our current system.