Let’s Talk About Healthcare and Plummeting Home Values
In last nights speech, Obama touched on many subjects, but two stood out for me. Healthcare and plummeting home values.
On healthcare, I was told more and more people are going without insurance. As it stands, the uninsured are supposed to be able to go into a hospital and be “stabalized” for free. What I didn’t hear discussed is Michelle Obama and David Axelrod are depriving poor people of healthcare:
U. of C. shunning poor patients?
Obama’s wife, 3 aides tied to plan to free up spaceSen. Barack Obama’s wife and three close advisers have been involved with a program at the University of Chicago Medical Center that steers patients who don’t have private insurance ” primarily poor, black people ” to other health care facilities.
By steering them elsewhere, the hospital can afford to pay Michelle $300,000 plus per year. Or maybe it was the ‘double bunking’ — housing critically ill babies in side-by-side cribs in a space designed for one, and then billing Medicaid the full rate. Either way, Michelle gave up that cushy law firm job so she could earn a pittance.
On plummeting home prices, I have a few issues.
When you take out more than one mortgage to buy a home, chances are that you can’t afford it. I have a friend that sold her home two years ago. It went for about $350,000. The man that bought it had to have two mortgages. He took out cash on his credit cards for the down payment. We figured that within the year, her old home would be in foreclosure. We were wrong, it took about eighteen months. The home is in foreclosure and because of that, the neighborhood absorbs it because that is part of the rating system. Her old neighbors just saw their home values go down.
There are a few of you that bought homes in the olden days. That was a time when you went to your bank for a home loan. As crazy as it sounds, those banks made sure that you could actually pay on that note for 30 years. They weren’t in the business of repo. You basically promised them your first born. Remember how you were forced to buy the home you could actually pay for and not the home you wished you could pay for.
Negative net worth in home value. People owe more than the house is worth. I think that Malkin has done the best job of pointing out the fact from the fiction. Read her archives. In the meantime, this is the reality of the situation:
Joann’s parents, Johnnie Gardner, 87, and Estelle, 88, bought the two-bedroom in the Sobrante Park neighborhood in 1954 for $11,500. His salary as an electrician at the Oakland naval shipyard allowed them to make the payments.
But in recent years, Joann and her brother refinanced it several times for increasingly larger amounts.
The final refinance at the end of 2006 left the family owing $454,000. The monthly payments of $3,362 exceeded the household income of $3,144.
What happened to the money from all the refinances?
Gardner can’t quite say. Some went to paying off credit cards; some was eaten up in huge loan fees. What is clear is that the family has not made a mortgage payment since December 2006.
We just had a massive bailout for roughly 400,000 homeowners. Can anyone point out the reform part of the legislation? I am being serious. Where did the lending get reformed?
What I heard last night was that I should bail out my neighbor because that is the American Promise, a promise by the way, that I never saw in The Constitution Of The United States Of America.
Loading ...
August 29, 2008 - 08:49 AM on August 29th, 2008
[...] Original post by Pam [...]