Good Idea? Extend Medicare to everyone rather than start a new health care system?
Jay J asked:
I agree with Ralph Nader but I had this idea from day one. He may have stolen it from me. Can you imagine what the start-up costs for universal health care would be? Billions and Billions. Why not supplement Medicare with these billions and just cover everyone?
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I agree with Ralph Nader but I had this idea from day one. He may have stolen it from me. Can you imagine what the start-up costs for universal health care would be? Billions and Billions. Why not supplement Medicare with these billions and just cover everyone?
August 1st, 2009 at 1:46 pm
yes.
vote obama……….!!!!
obama haters……..(same old thing for u bout volcano)!
August 4th, 2009 at 7:53 am
Great idea.
Commit billions more to entitlement programs,jack taxes sky high and crash the economy.
Then we’ll ALL need medicare.
August 6th, 2009 at 12:01 am
Why is there such a concern, set it up right and it will pay off later
How come there was never such concern on spending to invade other countries?
August 6th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
Explain something to me … people around here who can’t afford insurance usually get medicaid. Why do we need a social medicine system? Heard it’s mandatory and if refused, you’ll be fined. The ones that don’t have any type coverage usually just don’t pay … we pay for it. Extending medicare and forgetting this socialized medical garbage is a good plan!
August 10th, 2009 at 12:32 am
Steal from the middle class to pay the rich to provide poorly regulated corrupt overinflated healthcare.
Good idea
Why do I get the feeling the cost of everything will surprisingly go up?
August 12th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
Medicare is going broke as it is. You’ve heard about the deficit haven’t you? Well Social Security and Medicare are kept on a seperate set of books than the general fund, just like the war is on a seperate set of books. If a corporation kept records like this they lock the CEO up and destroy the key. You add all three books together, we are $53 TRILLION in debt. That’s over $400,000 every man woman and child living right now in the USA needs to cough up to pay for the programs as they CURRENTLY stand. Social security and medicare will be broke by 2040. There is no money for what you are proposing. The government doesn’t have un unlimited supply of money. They can’t just print it or rip it off of trees.
Oh and for the poeple who say “we have money for the war why not this.” Look up how much we are spending on defense right now. The percentage of our GNP that is being spent on the military is actually LESS right now than it was in 1993. You could dismantle the military and it’s still not enough to bail out social security.
August 13th, 2009 at 11:07 am
It’s so funny to hear people speak about universal health care as if it is a viable thing to do here in the U.S.. If you think that the cost of running a war over in the the Middle East is hurting our country, just watch how fast our economy tanks if we go ahead and implement universal health care. While it’s a noble notion to want to ensure that everybody in the U.S. has their health taken care of, when was the last time the govt took on anything and did a good job of it?! The costs for health care will skyrocket without the market forces in place to restrain them. I predict that it will not take more than a few short years for the costs to become so overwhelming so as to make rationing of services necessary. Just ask anybody in Canada or the U.K. who has been unfortunate enough to develop cancer or some other life threatening disease just how helpful their country’s public health care systems have been for them.
August 15th, 2009 at 1:30 am
Well there they go again…
The idea of extending the Medicare system to cover every man woman and child in this country is AGAIN being painted as SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. The great buggy man. We will have our care RATIONED to us.
Well let me inform you misguided souls of something. You are on rationed health care right now. Sure you say - your crazy - I have a private insurance plan. But you forget that when you signed up, you were given a book, that says who you can and can not go to see, and have the plan pay the promised benefits. And, how many times have you heard stories about health care companies denying claims, or care, by saying it is experimental. THAT my friend is rationing wrapped up in a fancy package.
And oh the cries of how inefficient any program run by the government will be. Waisting your money on, as one person put it, poorly regulated programs. Except the facts do not support your statements. Medicare has an overhead of less than 5%; the difference between what is paid into the plan by all sources, and what is paid out in services covered. The most efficient private health care insurers have overheads in the 25-45% range. Most of this related to duplicate staffs doing the same thing in every company, and of course profits to be paid to the stockholders. So tell me again about who is efficient.
And why is it that every time we hear this, so many people say that it will bankrupt the country? If your employer did not have to pay for the insurance premiums for your coverage, and instead paid a head tax to the government of about 75 to 85 cents on the dollar of what he/she is paying in premiums now; wouldn’t they be better off on the bottom line?
My wife was just in the hospital, and when we got the bill, the price without insurance coverage was $16,800.00. With insurance, the price dropped to $1,695.00. This coverage is with the largest private insurer in the country. So if everyone who came into the door and had the same stay in the hospital were to receive the same $1695 bill for their care; instead of the bloated bill for no coverage, how would this drive up prices?
The hospitals and doctors could charge a reasonable fee for the services, knowing that everything they do will be paid for. Billions would be saved in not having vast staffs of bill collectors trying to get the poor smuck who did not have coverage to pay 16 thousand dollars, for 2 thousand dollars worth of care.
The key to the whole thing working, is to charge the employers to provide health care for the workers, at a cost that is lower than the current premiums they are paying.
Let any doctor of hospital opt to charge a higher fee for their services than that paid by the plan, but mandate that they have to first tell the patient that they will be charging an additional fee, above the plan payment, BEFORE they render services. Then let market forces drive those who charge to much out of business.
Keep people healthier by providing preventive care, instead of doing as W says and treating them in the emergency room, once they are to sick to cope. Turning a need for a $20 prescription and $40 office visit into a $100,000 stay in a ICU unit. ( W recently said that everyone can get care - they just have to go to the emergency room)
August 16th, 2009 at 12:27 am
It’s true in EVERY other country with the government running the system. In fact, they are ALL either ignoring the private options springing up OR foisting MORE off on the private systems. In the US we have pockets of UHC as with Medicare. This is a Ponzi scheme and the crazies in the government want to balance it on the backs of the DOCTORS:
In the US, Medicare is going bankrupt. In 1998, Medicare premiums were $43.80 and in 2008 will be $96.40–up 120%. “Medigap” insurance is common because of the 20% co-pay required for service. Medicare HMOs are common because they reduce that burden without an extra charge in many cases. HOWEVER, many procedures which used to have no or a low co-pay NOW cost the full 20% for the HMO Medicare patient. ALSO the prescription coverage they tended to offer has been REDUCED in many cases to conform to the insane “donut hole” coverage of the feds. Doctors are leaving Medicare because of the low and slow pay AND because the crazy government wants to “balance” their Ponzi scheme on the backs of doctors.
“That dark cloud lurking over the shoulder of every Massachusetts physician is Medicare. If Congress does not act, doctors’ payments from Medicare will be cut by about 5 percent annually, beginning next year through 2012, creating a financial hailstorm that would wreak havoc with already strained practices.
Cumulatively, the proposed cuts represent a 31 percent reduction in Medicare reimbursement. If the cuts are adjusted for practice-cost inflation, the American Medical Association says Medicare payment rates to physicians in 2013 would be less than half of what they were in 1991.”
You mean that Medicare that doctors are abandoning left and right because they’re going broke with it?
You do realize what UHC looks like for real throughout the world, yes? From a Canadian doc who studies health care (and moved here):
“…Another sign of transformation: Canadian doctors, long silent on the health-care system’s problems, are starting to speak up. Last August, they voted Brian Day president of their national association. A former socialist who counts Fidel Castro as a personal acquaintance, Day has nevertheless become perhaps the most vocal critic of Canadian public health care, having opened his own private surgery center as a remedy for long waiting lists and then challenged the government to shut him down. “This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week,” he fumed to the New York Times, “and in which humans can wait two to three years.”
And now even Canadian governments are looking to the private sector to shrink the waiting lists. Day’s clinic, for instance, handles workers’-compensation cases for employees of both public and private corporations. In British Columbia, private clinics perform roughly 80 percent of government-funded diagnostic testing. In Ontario, where fealty to socialized medicine has always been strong, the government recently hired a private firm to staff a rural hospital’s emergency room.
This privatizing trend is reaching Europe, too. Britain’s government-run health care dates back to the 1940s. Yet the Labour Party—which originally created the National Health Service and used to bristle at the suggestion of private medicine, dismissing it as “Americanization”—now openly favors privatization. Sir William Wells, a senior British health official, recently said: “The big trouble with a state monopoly is that it builds in massive inefficiencies and inward-looking culture.” Last year, the private sector provided about 5 percent of Britain’s nonemergency procedures; Labour aims to triple that percentage by 2008. The Labour government also works to voucherize certain surgeries, offering patients a choice of four providers, at least one private. And in a recent move, the government will contract out some primary care services, perhaps to American firms such as UnitedHealth Group and Kaiser Permanente.
Sweden’s government, after the completion of the latest round of privatizations, will be contracting out some 80 percent of Stockholm’s primary care and 40 percent of its total health services, including one of the city’s largest hospitals. Since the fall of Communism, Slovakia has looked to liberalize its state-run system, introducing co-payments and privatizations. And modest market reforms have begun in Germany: increasing co-pays, enhancing insurance competition, and turning state enterprises over to the private sector (within a decade, only a minority of German hospitals will remain under state control). It’s important to note that change in these countries is slow and gradual—market reforms remain controversial. But if the United States was once the exception for viewing a vibrant private sector in health care as essential, it is so no longer.”
August 18th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
I am in favor of some kind of national health insurance, but I hate to see the government have exclusive control over it. Your idea is a good one, and I’m wondering what the cons are to doing it? You asked a great question, and I’m going to look into it some more on my own.
August 20th, 2009 at 12:06 am
Sure vote for the democrats and then everyone who works can pay twice as much in taxes to pay for all those that don’t, drug addicts and illegal immigrants to have healthcare. Does anyone realize that if you are sick in America you can go to a hospital for emergencies and they will help you even if you are broke. They will send you a bill later but we have programs for those who cannot afford it. I know because i’ve done it. Furthermore if they do send you a bill you can pay it a little at a time. Thats Life. The problem is that people that can actually afford health insurance don’t pay for it until they are sick.