Thursday 26 December 2019

The Billion Euro Loss in Health Funds?

In the past week, if you follow German health insurance news.....the companies all came up and admitted that together.....they went past their normal budget by about one-billion Euro, and so they had to dip into reserves.

A long-term problem?  Well, yeah.

The bulk of blame?  You could assign blame to around a dozen factors, but the biggest issue was nursing salary increases which had to be prioritized in 2019 because of nurses walking out of the profession, and trying to make up for shortfalls in the nursing population (recruiting from outside of Germany). 

The odds this shortfall will continue into 2020?  About a hundred-percent chance.  So by 2021's national election....a national crisis and more costs for the insurance fund?  It'll likely become a top five topic for the national election. 

The Homeless Story

President Trump basically gave the 'warning' to the California state government (particularly the governor) to settle it's homeless problems, or face federal intervention.

The Governor Newsom problem?  He's basically locked into a lose-lose situation at this point.  The city councils of San Francisco and Los Angeles (all Democratic-controlled operations)?  They now face an extreme problem.

What happens now?  I'll lay out three likely things to occur over the next six months.

First, President Trump simply sent a 'warning'.  There is no schedule attached to this, and it might be twelve months before you see the threat go to the next level.

Second, the President will use this chaos to arrive in California and talk in a campaign message that the Governor and Democratic councils are screwing the general public and triggering the crisis to continue.  Whether they like it or not....you could see a million voters walk away from the Democrats in 2020's state election.  Enough to change the outcome?  No....Hillary picked up 8.7-million votes, and Trump barely managed 4.5-million, so a million flipped votes wouldn't matter.

However, in district races.....if you scattered a million extra votes around....it'd probably flip at least five Democratic House seats over to the GOP.  I suspect the bulk of this 'pressure' is about flipping House seats.

Third and final....in the stakes of a poker game....he's trying to force them to take measures that would be extreme.

Trying to resolve the homeless issues?  I would go and suggest that the last thing that the federal government wants to do....is draw a line and say they want to fix this.  You'd basically end up with three chief things that would be forced down:

1.  Judges would be brought in and if you were mentally unstable....you'd be sent to some isolated federal controlled facility way out in the desert where the mental-case people would be isolated.

2.  Drug-addicted folks would be given a one-shot rehab deal, and then if they failed that....they'd go to the desert facility described in the paragraph above.

3.  Finally, you'd build cheap housing units with private security attached, and if you demonstrated you weren't willing to play by society rules....you'd also go to the desert facility described in the paragraph above.

At the end of this 'mess', I suspect that three-quarters of the homeless crowd would not be allowed into the public scene and live out their lives in a quiet compound area surrounded by security fences.