Thursday - April 14, 2005

Medicare: The Real Problem

One issue left off the poll yesterday was Medicare (poll results will be published next week and a second poll to determine where you stand on those issues will be posted on Monday or Tuesday).

Medicare was left off because no one here seems to understand or care what a real problem it is .... and it is only going to get worse as baby boomers get older. Much worse than the Social Security crisis that is looming on the horizon. There are many reasons for this but you need to read these two articles to fully understand ....

First, in Canuckistan, the problem seems to be arriving much earlier than it will here in the USA because of the Canucks’ socialist medical system.

Harper given electoral bomb on health-care
Canadian Press

OTTAWA — Preston Manning and Mike Harris tossed an electoral bomb into the lap of Conservative Leader Stephen Harper on Wednesday, issuing a joint report calling on Ottawa to get out of medicare and let the provinces experiment with private health services.

Manning, the Reform party founder, and Harris, the former Ontario Tory premier, insisted their report, commissioned by the right-wing Fraser Institute, was non-partisan.

But it quickly became fodder for a potential federal election.

Follow the link and go read the rest. It is on the verge of outright chaos in our northern neighbor’s government over this issue. That house of cards called Canadian Public Health is about to come crashing down. Sic Semper Socialists!

Meanwhile, back in the Home Of The Brave and Land Of The Free, the situation is not much better. Did you know that Medicare in the US is already running in the red and has been since last year?

Medicare v. Social Security: Who’s on First?
Medicare may be failing faster, but both can be saved

First, the facts. Both programs are in trouble because they are subject to the same alarming demographic trends. Today, these programs have about four workers paying taxes to support each beneficiary. Starting in 2008, 70 million baby boomers will begin retiring, and they will live longer than their parents did. That means that the number of workers paying for each beneficiary will drop to just over two by mid-century.

But Medicare adds a number of multipliers that make its situation more severe. Social Security benefits are tied to wage growth; Medicare spending is tied to health-care costs, which are rising more rapidly. Medicare benefits are paid in the form of medical care, rather than lump sums of money. Seniors only receive subsidies when they go to the doctor — something Medicare encourages them to do more often. And there is constant pressure to expand Medicare benefits — from seniors, healthcare interest groups, and advocates of socialized medicine. Recent examples include the new prescription drug benefit, as well as coverage for preventive screening, obesity, and quit-smoking programs that President Bush added by fiat.

These factors make Medicare’s fiscal outlook over five times worse than Social Security’s. Social Security is expected to run a deficit starting in 2017. But the hospital insurance (HI) portion of Medicare began running a deficit last year. It was equal to nearly 9 percent of all federal income-tax revenue, and will only get worse. To finance the rising costs of outpatient expenses like doctor visits and prescription drugs will require huge transfers from the general revenue fund in coming years. Medicare trustee Tom Saving and his colleague Andrew Rettenmaier estimate that Medicare will consume 25 percent of federal income tax revenue by 2020, and 50 percent by 2040.

To fund all of Social Security’s future deficits, we would need to set aside $12.8 trillion in an interest-bearing account today. Fully funding Medicare’s future deficits would require a whopping $68.4 trillion. According to Cato Institute Senior Fellow Jagadeesh Gokhale, if Congress waits until 2008 to tackle Medicare’s financial problems, a Medicare payroll tax hike of nearly 700 percent will be needed to cover all its future deficits.

If those numbers don’t scare you then nothing will. The article cited above came from the prestigious Cato Institute and I tend to believe the numbers .... which is even scarier since it is not coming from some Leftist goblin with crap for brains.

No, these experiments in socialism that began in both countries after the depression and WWII are about to fall totally apart, just when the people they were “supposed to help” start to use them. The next twenty or thirty years may get extremely ugly as millions of “seniors” strap on their dentures and Depends underware and start a revolution, carrying pitchforks and torches to the castle of the evil government scientists who invented this monster called socialism.

Posted by Z Woof     on 04/14/2005 at 11:47 AM   
Filed Under: • Social-Security •  
• Comments (21) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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