Medicare Key To Conquering Deficit Dilemma

[dkf]

"If you look past the next eight to 10 years, Medicare is the deficit problem," says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former head of the Congressional Budget Office. "And there's simply no way we can address our fiscal problems without coming to terms with Medicare's future."

It's a future that includes 78 million baby boomers, the first of whom are just now getting their Medicare cards. Health policy analyst Jeff Goldsmith, who has studied the boomer generation, says that has been largely overlooked in the debate over the new health law.

"In the first 10 years of health reform being implemented, you'll see 30-some-odd million baby boomers become eligible for and enroll in Medicare," he says.

That's an increase in Medicare's population of about 30 percent.

Unless you change who is eligible for the program -- something no one seems to be suggesting -- there are really only two ways to make Medicare cost less: Pay health care providers like doctors and hospitals less, or make Medicare patients pay more. Until now, neither has been very popular politically.

http://m.npr.org/story/131701211?url=/2010/12/01/131701211/medicare-key-to-conquering-deficit-dilemma

[OKNancy]

1. lower the age so that healthier/younger people

will pay premiums, but use less services! There... problem solved. LOL

[dkf]

3. Premiums don't pay for all the benefits. It is subsidized by worker's payroll taxes.

[BzaDem]

2. There is only one way to solve this problem: price controls. Single Payer/public option are forms

of price controls. Single payer directly controls prices (a negotiation "you can't refuse"), while a public option will only work to the extent it controls prices through its market power.

Price controls can also be set in a completely private market (such as Switzerland/Netherlands, and to a certain extent Singapore).

The particular form of price control matters less than the fact that one is enacted. If none is enacted, the deficit will grow as a percentage of our GDP every year.

[HillbillyBob]

7. yup and muzzle that neokon eakin a hole.

We have watched the Rs systematically destroy all true democracy in this country. It is time to treat them like the enemies they are.
Fairness doctrine, the consolidation of media into rpuke hands.
tax gifts to them while destroying our rights, letting our infrastructure crumble while they and their cronies pocket our tax $ in privateering public works.

It has taken 30 yrs to get here, and the idiots still vote for pukes against the middle class. Because maybe just maybe they 'might' be rich some day. I would like to piss in their wheaties since they stole those same wheaties from us who built this country.

[Little Star]

4. Belch....

Fix the deficit dilemma by taxing the rich and cutting the defense budget.

[BzaDem]

5. Won't work. Medicare grows at 3 times inflation. Taxes/defense spending do not grow nearly that fast

[Little Star]

10. Add in Medicare for all and problem solved.

[PA Democrat]

6. The problem is not Medicare itself, but rather our entire health "care" system.

Medicare, funded by taxpayer money covers the oldest and sickest Americans. The people who are the least expensive to insure and to provide with health care are covered by for-profit insurers. It is a repeat of all that is wrong with the excessive influence of corporate interests. Profits are privatized and costs are socialized. Insurance companies will offer insurance only to those people they believe will be profitable. The rest are uninsured, covered by Medicaid, or covered by Medicare.

The solution is NOT to cut Medicare, but a single-payer, not-for-profit system for ALL Americans.

[dkf]

8. That is perverse, isn't it?

Yet private health insurance is so expensive and it doesn't cover the oldest or sickest.

[HillbillyBob]

9. Plus we are a nation of many sedentary folks who eat crap

the crap that we are bombarded with ads for that is not really food, but chemical messes that never ever were seen in nature nor should be. Yet the makers of this so called food buy lobby pressure to get subsidies out of our tax funds. Instead those same funds should not go to BT/Monsanto Factory farms but into nutritious food prep, education about what is food and what is crap and preventative care.

[JHB]

11. Americans already pay more in taxes for health care than "socialized" systems...

...according to a study, reporting of which I inconveniently can't turn up at the moment, sorry. (haven't figured how to narrow the search enough to find it without getting swamped with all sorts of RW noise about British and Canadian systems)

The gist of it was that Americans already pay more in taxes (per capita) for government-funded healthcare systems (Medicare, Medicaid, VA, govt worker health plans, Congress's health plan, etc. Don't recall if it was just Feds or if state and local were included) than British or Canadian citizens do for their "socialized" systems which cover everyone. And then we get to pay extra for our own coverage if you're not in one of the above, joy joy.

[BzaDem]

12. Indeed. That's what happens when we have two systems (public and private), where the private

system's costs are able to grow without bound. At that point, the public system can't lower rates to something more reasonable, since then providers will just turn everyone down on the public system (whereas if there were just one system with controlled prices, they couldn't turn anyone down unless they left the profession entirely).