But the problem I see is America's previous administrations have embarked on a war against work!
Please.
We bring in cheap immigrants to replace citizens' middle class jobs, then we put those citizens on the social safety net AKA, welfare of one sort of another. Yet the social costs of many immigrants eventually land on the social burden of the country in one way or another.
Yeah, that's all nonsense.
The US has enacted increasingly strict immigration policies for years. Ironically, the strict policies backfire. When the border was easy to cross, migrants would come to the US to work, and then turn around and go home. As crossing the border becomes more difficult and expensive and outright dangerous, those migrants come to the US and
stay in the US.
Foreign migrants aren't taking middle-income jobs, they're taking low-income and low-education jobs, such as farming, or the low end of construction, or in sweat shops. It is automation that has mostly killed the low-education middle-income job, notably in manufacturing. They do displace some workers, but they aren't displacing a lot of middle-income jobs.
And again, strict enforcement of immigration laws backfires. If companies can't hire cheap labor in the US, they will automate or outsource it. US companies can either hire cheap labor in the US or hire it elsewhere; what's your preference?
Immigrants (documented and otherwise) don't produce a massive "social burden." They
increase growth, because while in the US they need to buy food, rent homes, drive to work, buy clothes and so on. Many of them pay taxes for services they will never receive, too.
Blaming immigrants for the health system Americans created, mostly by conservatives demanding free-market solutions, does not fly.
And one way is the excessive use of Medicaid and ER visits for the poor, which make hospitals run on a loss. Add that to Medicare of an aging population, and slimmed down medical plans due to Obamacare, and hospital system begins to die.
Try again.
People overuse emergency rooms because
they don't have access to decent health care, and the ER can't turn people away based on the ability to pay. If we had a more rational system, where doctors were better distributed and routine office visits were mostly covered (i.e. pretty much everywhere except the US), there would be far less inappropriate use of ERs.
For this very reason, Medicaid isn't bankrupting hospitals. In fact, in the OP's article, the hospital failed because Tennessee
refused to expand Medicaid. Instead of getting paid to help poor people, they simply bill them and the bills go unpaid.
The only solution is higher employment.
Uh, hello? Unemployment is below 4%. It's been falling since 2009. Unemployment hasn't been this low in
decades.
Employment isn't the problem, especially since fewer and fewer jobs now offer health insurance. It's that we have this screwed-up system which turns medicine into a profit center, which produces all sorts of inappropriate incentives; and to cope with it, we have an awful system where insurers act as middle men, driving up prices while trying to profit by covering as little as possible, and setting up games where hospitals pretend to charge $250,000 for a heart attack because that's the start of negotiations with the insurers.
