Free Republic

The numbers are hard to ignore. According to the 2016 report from the Boards of Trustees, Medicare Part A will run out of money in less than 11 years. As a country, the United States is experiencing “deer caught in the headlights syndrome”; We’ve been alerted to a grave impending danger, but we’re frozen into inaction. Whether we choose to accept it or not, something has to give. The truck is barreling down the road, and if we don’t do something soon, we’ll all be roadkill. Why don’t our leaders act? Because they can’t come up with a solution that...

Cancer clinics across the country have begun turning away thousands of Medicare patients, blaming the sequester budget cuts. Oncologists say the reduced funding, which took effect for Medicare on April 1, makes it impossible to administer expensive chemotherapy drugs while staying afloat financially. Patients at these clinics would need to seek treatment elsewhere, such as at hospitals that might not have the capacity to accommodate them. “If we treated the patients receiving the most expensive drugs, we’d be out of business in six months to a year,” said Jeff Vacirca, chief executive of North Shore Hematology Oncology Associates in New...