The last couple of posts reported some reassuring news about Medicare. But don’t get complacent. A new effort to cut or eliminate Medicare is in the works.
Medicare was created in 1965 because growing numbers of senior Americans had no health insurance and were going without medical care. Since then, Americans have depended on Medicare to see them through the health challenges of their senior years. These challenges include mesothelioma, which is nearly always diagnosed in people who are in or approaching their retirement years.
But several recent news stories say there is a new, organized effort to cut the program. See, for example, “Beware! The Tea Party Is Coming After Your Medicare” in the Washington Times and “Medicare Overhaul? The Tea Party Sees a Chance” in the Christian Science Monitor.
The conservative activist organization FreedomWorks, which helped form the Tea Party movement, is calling on its members to pack town hall meetings in August to demand that Medicare spending be put on the chopping block. This will be just a first move in an all-out effort to enact Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan. Among other things, the Ryan plan will “save” money by turning the Medicare program over to private insurance companies and requiring seniors to pay more of their own health care expenses.
The argument behind the Ryan Medicare plan is that since Medicare costs more and more money every year, the government has no choice but to stop paying for so many benefits. Instead, the government would give private insurance companies a fixed amount of money in the form of a voucher to help subsidize health insurance policies for seniors.
But the amount of money the Ryan plan provides is far below the real cost of comprehensive coverage. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the subsidized policies would cover only about a third of seniors’ medical expenses. Under the Ryan plan, seniors might have to pay thousands of dollars per year for their own health care, or go without.
Supporters of this idea argue that private insurance companies would do a better job of providing benefits for less money than government bureaucrats. Also, they say, requiring seniors to spend more of their own money for health care will make them savvier health care shoppers, which would help keep down costs.
Opponents of the Ryan plan point out that there is no real-world evidence that private insurers would be more cost-effective at providing benefits than government. In fact, all the evidence says just the opposite is true. The per-person cost of private health insurance has risen much more in recent years than the cost of Medicare. Further, in spite of what you may have heard, countries that provide health care to most of its citizens through government programs have much lower costs than the U.S., and by many measures some are providing better health care overall than we are.
There is also plenty of real-world evidence telling us than people without adequate insurance go without necessary health care because they can’t pay for it. And then when they do go to a doctor, their health issues are harder, and more expensive, to treat.
The problem the U.S. has is not that Medicare is too expensive, but that health care is too expensive. Health care costs more everywhere on our planet, but in the U.S. costs have gone up much faster and much higher than anywhere else. This is not just a problem for federal and state budgets, but also is slowing business growth and job creation. Taking Medicare benefits away from seniors doesn’t solve the real problem.
This entry was posted on Monday, August 8th, 2011 at 7:32 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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