I
turn sixty five (65!) this month. This designates me as officially
OLD, but it does provide my biggest birthday perk since I turned 21.
I'm now covered by Medicare. This will reduce my health insurance
premium by several hundred dollars a month. Gone is my $3,500
deductible health plan with premiums that have increase by over
20% per year
for the past five years. The provisions of Medicare reduces the
likelihood of such premium inflation and
lowers barriers to switching coverage or companies.
The
current insurance-company-centric health-care funding system is a
disaster. ObamaCare was a reaction to some of its largest flaws:
pre-existing conditions, rigid underwriting requirements, multiple
administrative layers and exploding premiums. I wish that President
Obama had proposed that all Americans be covered by Medicare, a
system with a sound structure of Medicare that has worked well for
nearly fifty years.
Instead,
we are being phased into the Patient Protection and Affordable Care
Act (PPACA-a lousy acronym), a compromised, complicated, and
constantly-threatened program known as ObamaCare.
So
what is Medicare? Here's what Wikipedia has to say:
Medicare
is a national social
insurance
program, administered by the U.S.
federal government
since 1965, that guarantees access to health insurance for Americans
aged 65 and older and younger people with disabilities end
stage renal disease
and Lou
Gehrig’s Disease.
As a social insurance program, Medicare spreads the financial risk
associated with illness across society to protect everyone, and thus
has a somewhat different social role from for-profit private
insurers, which manage their risk portfolio by adjusting their
pricing according to perceived risk.
Yikes,
that sounds a lot like Socialized Medicine. I'm sure every Fox
News-watching conservative has opted out of this dangerous program.
In
1965, Congress created Medicare under Title XVIII of the Social
Security Act to provide health insurance to people age 65 and
older, regardless of income or medical history. Before Medicare's
creation, only half of older adults had health insurance, with
coverage often unavailable or unaffordable to the other half, because
older adults had half as much income as younger people and paid
nearly three times as much for health insurance. Medicare also
spurred the racial integration of thousands of waiting rooms,
hospital floors, and physician
practices by making payments to health care providers conditional on
desegregation.
Forty-eight
million Americans are covered by Medicare. Many of those would be bankrupt
without it. Medicare and Social Security are in urgent need of
adjustments to make them sustainable for future generations, but
math-challenged politicians of both parties are unwilling to accept
that expenses must be controlled AND
taxes must be raised to fix these issues.
Here's
a quote from "Why we need to fix Social Security now," by
Mary Beth Franklin in InvestmentNews
(June 10, 2013):
By 2033, reserves in
the Social Security trust fund will be exhausted and revenue from
payroll taxes will be sufficient to pay just 77% of promised
benefits. The disability trust fund is in worse shape, projected to
exhaust its surplus in just four years, at which point it could pay
just 80% of promised benefits. And Medicare is now expected to limp
along through 2026, two years later than previously projected.
Medicare
and Social Security are sacred social contracts between various
generations of Americans. As with the budget deficit, these issues
get worse if neglected. Share your thoughts with your elected
representatives.