>>Medicaid and Medicare are part of the "War on Poverty" because they were proposed, legislated and passed as such. Unbundling them from the expenditure totals would be disingenuous.

Not as disingenuous as insisting that healthcare is a failure unless it reduces poverty. As your own quote states: "Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it." See that first intention? Seems to me that healthcare does an admirable job on that one. QED.

>>Might be best to review the regulatory, tax and anti-business climate which has led to the relocation of manufacturing facilities. Mischaracterizing the approach as search for "short-term" gain is to fundamentally misunderstand (or purposely misstate) the goal. The object of lowering expenses IS long-term growth.

Your position only makes sense if it's possible to emulate Chinese costs locally. If that's not possible, then it's silly to pin it on taxation or anti-business climate: fact is that local costs are higher. Society needs to decide whether it will wear these higher costs in the interest of local industry and employment, or whether it will erect trade barriers (as it does for farming) to protect local interests, or whether it's OK to offshore the lot to save $. Except that corporates in many sectors have already made that decision whether society likes it or not. While it is a truism that reducing expenses is a strategy for growth, that's only true if you are still providing the service. Not easy to "grow" something that no longer exists.

As for the $1/month to cover later health needs: it's another truism that you have to keep contributions in line with inflation to make it work. If voters in the scolding generations preferred to keep paying smaller amounts than required to support the scheme, sure it helped them get richer but it's just another Ponzi scheme that will fail soon enough.