“Medicare’s trustees estimate that the hospital insurance fund supported by the payroll tax will run out of cash by 2024,” informs a Washington Post editorial, “but this is mainly a symbolic threat: The government will draw on general revenues to keep Medicare going.”
So, what exactly does this “symbolic threat” symbolize?
It shows that Medicare — like Social Security — was set up and run in an unsustainable, even fraudulent, way. Politicians promised benefits without collecting the taxes to pay for those benefits. This left “today’s voters” getting unpaid for bennies and future voters being handed a hefty bill.
The only question is: how hefty? That depends on how quickly the imbalance gets addressed.
Already, Medicare represents 15 percent of total federal government spending, last year costing taxpayers $555 billion. Worse yet, the cost is expected to double in the next decade — in large part, because the number of seniors on the program is expected to explode, from 50 million today to 78 million by 2030.
“No structural solution is,” the editorial bemoans, “for the moment, politically possible.” Instead, the Post endorses a number of small cuts — all making seniors pay more and/or get less — that add up to slightly over $40 billion a year. That drop in the bucket would, in a decade, account for less than 4 percent of Medicare’s projected yearly cost.
Frankly, the unavoidable first step in any honest fix of Medicare’s big, structural problems, is for those in Congress and the White House to fully admit the rotten fraud they have perpetrated against us for their personal political gain.
Acknowledging their deception would be more than symbolic.
You can’t change your ways until you first repent.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
5 replies on “A Symbolic Threat”
Paul, repentance is for those who have an event horizon that exceeds the time to next election cycle.
While you have advocated term limits, it is beginning to appear to me that the limitation to a single term might be the better answer, with the Federal Government being limited strictly to the original intent of its actually mentioned enumerated powers.
The theft of goods and services in the present by passing the cost to the taxpayers of the future is fraud and known by all to be unsustainable.
Why is it that the members of Congress who are approving of this inter-generational theft are not in the same cell block as Mr. Madoff?
Technological advancement is omitted from this analysis. By 2030, we may not have nanotechnology, but will have far less expensive ways to deal with disease.
Make members of congress part of the same
pension and healthcare benefits as the rest of
us. Why should they have the power to screw
the public while receiving lavish pay and benefits
at OUR expense?
Medicare is a lousy deal. Even for seniors who’ve paid in all their working lives, and now depend on it.
David Goldhill, CEO of the Game Show Network, author of “How American Health Care Killed My Father” and life long Democrat, writes: “So even with the government paying almost all of their bills, today’s seniors pay a higher share of their income for health care than seniors did before Medicare.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-goldhill/a‑democrats-case-for-no_b_502229.html
This suggests that eliminating Medicare would lower the cost of medical care for seniors on Medicare! And it definately shows how much government has screwed up the health care marketplace.
As PJ O’Rourke said, “If you think things are expensive now, just wait until government makes them free.”
[…] Medicare’s future, as understood by the trustees […]