sajacy

You know the budget hasn't been balanced in years, right?

Let's guesstimate that over the last 20 years, for each dollar taxed, the government has been spending 5 more.

Those 5 dollars came from private investors and commercial banks. They gave USD money to Treasury, and received an IOU note from the Treasury. So:

1) The money is national debt, not taxpayer dollars.

2) The QE and other "unusual" things done by the Fed in the last decade means many of the Treasury notes are now held directly by the Federal Reserve. Treasury can and will magically convert the notes to USD currency over time, which the Fed disposes of by sending USD back to ... the Treasury.

3) The debt and Fed actions don't necessarily cause inflation. Also, inflation is a form of a "sales tax", which isn't what people consider "taxpayer money" (in the US, there is no general sales tax, only federal income tax)

Noteworthy(?): there seems to be a limit of ~100~ 140 sets of prices, as seen in the filenames:

2022-08-25_NNN_in-network-rates_0000000XXXXX.csv.gz

~Did I miss something? ... or is this some kind of technical limitation for Humana?~ Edit: I missed the alphabetical ordering. Still, only about 140 price sets.

Also, each plan member's JSON file has a small chunk of useful information, then a useless list of all 15k gz parts of a relevant NN_in-network-rates file (you only need the first filename to figure out which NN to reference).