Posted on 06/11/2011 7:26:13 AM PDT by Notary Sojac
Among many gems, here's the out of the park quote:
You can’t have an inter-generational trust fund that isn’t a trust fund and has no possibility of paying what it owes.
Medicare is already broke. It is unsustainable not just in the future but right now. No less a mainstream-media pillar than USA Today concedes that Medicare added a staggering $1.8 trillion in unfunded liabilities last year alone — a little-discussed debt mountain that actually outstrips by $300 billion the annual deficit that has animated Ryan, provoked a debt-ceiling controversy, and outraged three-quarters of Americans. Moreover, as the newspaper elaborates, to portray Medicare’s future unfunded liabilities as “only” $24.8 trillion requires a suspension of disbelief, taking at face value such Obamacare bookkeeping pretenses as the 30 percent reduction of physicians’ payments — “savings” that aren’t going to be realized. As the Heritage Foundation’s Bob Moffitt recounts, the Medicare actuary, using more realistic projections, puts the accrued shortfall at $34.8 trillion — which is two-and-a-half times the annual GDP of the United States and works out to about $300,000 owed by every household in the country.
I'd just fold Medicare into Medicaid and make it entirely means-tested.
“Compassionate Conservative Headquarters”
Should be nuked with a ten kiloton missile of truth.
Firss ask what are you personally willing to do.
Are you willing to pay your grandparents and parents medical bills?
Maybe they didnt “save enough”. But they structured their retirement provisions around what was a social norm for the past 50 years, that the program taxes they and their emplyers paid would provide old age insurance. That’s what they were sold, all of their working lives. That’s what they and their employers were forced to participate in, in lieu of higher wages and the ability to save more.
Are you willing to take them into your home when the equity in their house is all used up for medical bills? For then, they will be both sick and homeless.
The typical “wealth” of many people can be wiped out by one serious illness. Unfortunately, at a certain age you don’t get to start over.
Like Social Security Medicare was a Ponzi scheme from the start. Things only got worse when the “trust” funds for both were raided for general spending and filled with government IOUs. Sad thing that those of us who have paid in for most of our lives will be on the losing end as the FICA and Medicare funds withheld from our checks were just another income tax for which we get little or no benefit.
That's what I plan on doing. It's the least I owe them.
Really, does anyone think that kids will take care of the elderly when they can’t take care of themselves and it’s usually the other way around—the parents are still taking care of their kids or their grandkids.
Wealth? Everyone should be so lucky.
Why? No one asked me if I was personally willing to pay higher and higher taxes to foot the bill for everyone else. When I am given that consideration, then I will gladly entertain such questions.
But I paid into Medicare!
Make the doctors and medical companies work for free, by force if necessary!
Make the politicians pay for it!
/just kidding.
pwned
anyone who gives advice on what everyone else “should do” needs to start with themselves
I’m against that; I don’t mind paying for health care for old farts so much, but I resent being made to provide health care for the “poor.”
Well said. On target.
We did structure our lives around what they sold us. They took our money and said we would be taken care of when we retired. We worked and barely got by for years until we were able to save a little.
The young do not grasp what will happen when they get old.
Kids these days are not about saving. It’s all about ME, ME, I want it and I want it now, and I have a credit card that says I can get what I want.
Unlike in the past, the elderly are still caring for their descendants, yet today society treats them with less passion. Just when they need it the most.
I have to agree with you to a large extent. I know both are Ponzi schemes and were poorly designed, but people did pay specific taxes for these benefits based upon promises that never should have been made.
To lump these “entitlements” that required payment with those that did not does not help the debate. Changes necessary? Certainly. Long term transition to a day when programs can be largely privatized? Yes.
Let the government prove they can cut spending and cut programs. Department of Education is first in my book. Federal involvement has contributed to the ruination of public schooling.
Senior citizens who “paid” for a promised benefit bother me far less than standing behind an abled bodied non-married couple in the grocery line buying goodies that I would pass over due to cost and then loading them up into an expensive SUV. I don’t believe in “envy” politics but it pisses me off to see the number of people who get government goodies that were unpaid for and think it is a multi-generational right.
I say start from the ground up. We need a common defense. Damn near everything else can be scrapped. Show the American people including our senior citizens that we are serious about cutting the government down to size and we’ll have far more credibility when it comes to the long term dismantling of government benefits that atleast required a contribution from the recipient.
I say this as someone that pretty much counts on having to work until I die.
So, because other people were too stupid, too lazy, or too lied-to by the government, to save for their futures, and because government interference in the insurance markets has made it impossible to purchase basic catastrophic coverage for a reasonable premium, the rest of us should be fleeced to support these people?
Should the ants be enslaved to feed the grasshopper?
Oh, and by the way, my grandparents and my parents were all smart enough to have saved enough to cover themselves (and lucky enough to not have a tyrannical, voracious, liberal government steal it all from them), so I’ve got that base covered.
“just another income tax for which we get little or no benefit.”
That is pretty much the long and short of it.
Another killer of Medicare was the government tying it to Social Security. If you want Social Security, you must accept Medicare. Then huge swaths of retirees who could have private health insurance suddenly could not, driving up demand for a system that could have been funded by everyone but only used by the poor.
the Medicare actuary, using more realistic projections, puts the accrued shortfall at $34.8 trillion — which is two-and-a-half times the annual GDP of the United States and works out to about $300,000 owed by every household in the country
Show me your canceled check to the Treasury for 300 large before you tell me we can keep Medicare as it is.
Suggesting we have to fix every other government program before we deal with Medicare is like saying, "Let's trim that hangnail, and splint your broken wrist, before taking a look at that sucking chest wound, OK?"
Not suggesting we do nothing. But the author admits he is not a “tactician”. Zero and the Dems will cruise to reelection if we were to run on a platform like this.
At least, a lot less government-paid health care. It's coming whether you like it or not, and no matter who controls Washington.
The non-secret "secret" about the high cost of American health care compared to other nations is the billions upon billions we spend in essentially futile care during the last years of life. Barack Obama, Don Berwick, and Paul Ryan would all agree with this if their names could be kept off the quote.
If the system is to survive the demographic shifts of the next decades, this practice simply has to stop.
It may be that Paul Ryan prevails, and that the Medicare HMO's who are put in charge of utilization will determine that quadruple bypasses for patients who've had two strokes are "clinically ineffective" as compared to some prescriptions and a walker.
It may be that Barack Obama prevails, and that the Medicare advisory panel decides that a hip replacement is "not medically indicated" for 90 year olds, and that a nice wheelchair is more appropriate.
Both plans, if implemented, will see more patients go straight from the ED to a nice hospice room, if the prognosis for full recovery is thin enough.
And make no mistake, these decisions will all be cost motivated, and they will come to pass. Everyone who works in health care on the financial side has seen this coming for a decade.
The "golden age" of Medicare, when every new technology was covered, and when many weeks of life-prolonging attempts in the ICU preceded every death, is over. OVER.
Exactly
The government REQUIRES that to collect your SS, you must enroll in MEDICARE.
If you are a retired military member like me you MUST enoll in MEDICARE part B at age 65 or you are NOT ALLOWED to have access to TRICARE or any military treatment facilities!
Why?
Decoupling these programs seems like an easy test of weanng people off MEDICARE, IF you want to start cost cutting with age 65 and above citizens, who by and large are now trapped by choices they have made (or the govt made for them) over the past 40 years.
Who truthfully, are not going to be able to go get new jobs, start new careers, start racking up additional savings, or in many cases, find affordable private insurance and start over.
The entire system is stacked against that, and has been for decades, even in a goood economy. And this economy is a depression, by other means.
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