Medicare Buy In? Worst. Idea. Ever.

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Medicare Buy In? Worst. Idea. Ever.

Written By : McQ

What in the world are the Senate Democrats thinking? Isn’t this supposed to be about “health care reform”? Apparently their idea of reform is to take a system that has trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities and expand it without ever addressing the underlying reason for the huge future debt?

Brilliant. Just brilliant.

But apparently winning the process (passing something called “health care reform”) has become more important than the original purpose of “reform”.

This is just a stunningly bad idea, but one that seems to be generating some “enthusiasm” among Democrats and “progressives”:

Now, it appears, negotiators are making headway to ensure that the [Medicare] expansion would take place at a far quicker pace than any proposed public option. According to the well-placed source, Democrats are rallying behind a proposal that would allow a portion of the 55-64 year old age group to buy in to the Medicare system as early as 2010. By contrast, a public plan for insurance coverage would not come into being until 2014.

That group which would get immediate access, of course, would the the high-risk group that will cost the most to treat.

In addition to debating a potential start date for a Medicare buy-in proposal, Senate Democrats are also in negotiations over who, exactly, should be allowed to qualify for the expanded Medicare program. At this juncture, it doesn’t appear that everyone in the 55-64-age bracket would be granted access. Negotiators are considering limiting consumers to those who would qualify for high-risk insurance pools already set up under the Senate’s health care legislation. This would mean primarily those who have been uninsured for a certain amount of time, have a history of poor health or are unable to get insurance because of a preexisting condition. The Senate has already earmarked $5 billion for subsidies for this group to buy insurance and may increase that total to help them pay for Medicare coverage — should it become available to those under 65 and above 55 years of age.

Note that the subsidy is only to help this group buy insurance coverage under Medicare. It says nothing about the cost of that pool to Medicare. And, don’t forget, they’re cutting Medicare payments by $500 billion over then next 10 years.

Then, in 2014, they’re going to bring in the rest of that age group in total. And they’re going to tell you this will save money and “reform” health care?

What a load of horse apples. A little reminder for those who seem unable to remember or remain willfully ignorant:

According to the Medicare Trustees:

* Medicare’s expected future obligations exceeded premiums and dedicated taxes by $89 trillion.
* In other words, Medicare’s liability is about 5 1/2 times the size of Social Security’s ($18 trillion) and about six times the size of the entire U.S. economy.
* Throw in Medicaid, and health care spending alone will crowd out every other thing the federal government is doing by mid-century, says Goodman.

Yet to date, other than a claim they’re going to cut that $500 billion out of it – a claim I’d be willing to bet never happens – there is no recognition of the huge unfunded liability nor the fact that these additions they’re “negotiating” will simply swell it even more.

What does that mean to those starting to build a life for themselves now? Well, it isn’t pretty:

Future Payroll Tax Burdens. Currently, a 12.4 percent payroll tax on wages funds Social Security and a 2.9 percent payroll tax funds Medicare Part A (Hospital Insurance). But if payroll tax rates rise to meet unfunded obligations:

* When today’s college students reach retirement (about 2054), Social Security alone will require a 16.6 percent payroll tax, one-third greater than today’s rate.
* When Medicare Part A is included, the payroll tax burden will rise to 25.7 percent – more than one of every four dollars workers will earn that year.
* If Medicare Part B (physician services) and Part D are included, the total Social Security/Medicare burden will climb to 37 percent of payroll by 2054 – one in three dollars of taxable payroll, and twice the size of today’s payroll tax burden!

Thus, more than one-third of the wages workers earn in 2054 will need to be committed to pay benefits promised under current law. That is before any bridges or highways are built and before any teachers’ or police officers’ salaries are paid.

That’s also before this latest hare-brained idea by the Democrats (adding another entire decade’s worth of people to Medicare).

Look, you don’t have to be a Harvard PhD to figure this out (in fact, it appears it’s better if you’re not). We are being again sold further down an unsustainable river by a bunch of yahoos who seemingly have no cognizance of the detrimental future impact of what they’re proposing.

Between the promises they’ve made with Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, we’ll be broke before you know it:

* By 2020, in addition to payroll taxes and premiums, Social Security and Medicare will require more than one in four federal income tax dollars.
* By 2030, about the midpoint of the baby boomer retirement years, the programs will require nearly half of all income tax dollars.
* By 2060, they will require nearly three out of four income tax dollars.

And instead of fixing this, they’re now talking about adding to it and making it worse? If you need a picture (this is primarily for those Harvard PhDs who can’t seem to wrap their heads around the nonsense that’s being proposed) here you go:

1855

This is the mess the Democrats are “enthusiastic” about adding on too with trillions more in unfunded liabilities without addressing the necessary reform to “bend the cost curve down”. It is, in the truest sense, generational theft. It is unacceptable. It is obviously unaffordable and, unfortunately, they don’t seem smart enough to realize that.

This is an outrage and they need to know that they are so far afield on this that they’ve lost site of the goal – reform which makes health care more affordable. This monstrosity just gets more expensive as they “negotiate”.

Just kill it.

[Crossposted at QandO]

http://conservativebootcamp.com martinhale

We are being again sold further down an unsustainable river by a bunch of yahoos who seemingly have no cognizance of the detrimental future impact of what they’re proposing.

Don’t get me wrong – I think this expansion of a broken programme is absolute insanity – but this comment is just wrong. Those yahoos do know precisely what they’re doing. Money quote from an AP article on the topic:

Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., called it “an unvarnished, complete victory for people like me who have been arguing for a single-payer system.”

They’ve been trying to figure out how to put the US on the path to a single-payer health insurance system and they see this as a good start. They want to put all of the people who work for health insurers out of jobs. They want to seize 40%, 50%, 60% or more of your paycheck to fund their collectivist scheme. They really don’t care what it costs. Just like they really don’t care what you want, or what you think.

Never forget that these people want to consolidate their personal power at the expence of the people who generously elected them to office. They couldn’t care less about terms like “generational theft”. They really don’t care how much it takes from your paycheck for them to fulfill their statist fantasies. They’re in love with power, and that’s all that counts.

Oh, and by the way, those Medicare cuts will happen – it just won’t be done in an obvious way. They don’t have the stones to stand up in front of the electorate and say what they’re doing. They’ll hide behind a morass of agencies populated with bureaucrats who’ll establish commissions, panels and boards with cute sounding names such as NICE (The British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) which are tasked with the dirty work of keeping expensive treatments and expensive drugs out of the hands of those who need them. “Cor, it’s to save money, mate. Sorry you’re going titsup, but think of all the other blokes who’ll get Viagra with what we save on you.”

For those who need a glimpse of their health care future, go read this:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1234276/Britain-sick-man-Europe-Heart-cancer-survival-rates-worst-developed-world.html
Mike_M

Dems: “We’re going to get more people into Medicare by slashing benefits to people on Medicare. By the way, join Medicare!”

Almost as good as: “We’re going to spend out way out of debt!”

(We really just need a /facepalm HTML tag at this point)
http://conservativebootcamp.com martinhale

I didn’t know if John still has the “one link per comment” rule operating on his comment rendering engine, so I’m posting this link separately. It’s a follow-up to the one above and details the largess of the NHS w/regard to physician salaries:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1234626/British-GPs-paid-developed-country–despite-failing-NHS.html

Note that taken in comparison to average earnings among people of their home nation, Brit docs earn more than American docs. Sorta puts the lie to the whole “managing health care costs by managing what providers earn” meme, doesn’t it?
Jack Schite

Notice those are EXPECTED liabilities if nothing is done to control costs, which are rising because of the high costs of medication.

The costs can and will be reduced.

Anyway republicans would just assume get rid if Medicare so this is a big FU to the party of “no.”
Jack_Schitty

Haha! I made a funny! I said “just assume” when I meant “just as soon”. I’m such a dipsh*t!
http://guardian.blogdrive.com/ CavalierX

Posted by Jack Schite
2009-12-10 09:30:04

“Just assume?” English isn’t your first language, is it?
http://TheNixonTape.Blogspot.Com Dick_Nixon

Anyway republicans would just assume

Rosetta Stone is your friend.
http://Kingfisher Kingfisher

Anyway republicans would just assume

I was going to recommend “English for Dummies” but that would be way over your head. Is there a book titled, “English for Stupid People?”
http://conservativebootcamp.com martinhale

Jack you might want to do a little more research on Medicare before you put fingers to keyboard next time. I know you won’t take my advice because every day you post here, you reinforce your bona fides as a knee-jerk ideologue.

True, pharmaceuticals are a quick rising component of health care costs, but the careful student of this current debate will remember that Mr. Obama personally met with Big Pharma over the summer and gave them a sweet deal in trade for their cooperation on his reforms. Translation for laypeople: in return for some very modest cost containment measures, we’ve taken the cost of pharmaceuticals off the table in the health care debate. We’ll still have high single-digit and low double-digit increases in the cost of pharmaceuticals each year, but we’ll find other ways to make our $500Bn cuts.

And of course, while you’re pinning the entire blame on Big Pharma, which is a convenient target for knee-jerk libs such as yourself, you blithefully other, more significant elements of the cost of health care.

Take the cost of labour, for example. Just as with most businesses, the labour wage bill of a health care provider is the single largest line item on the expence side of the balance sheet. The reality is that during a moderately strong recession, health care labour unions (nursing unions, SEIU and others) have continued to demand increases to wages for millions of workers well beyond what the overall rise in American wages is at present.

Then there’s the spiraling cost of insurance for health care providers, both individual and institutional. Malpractice is simply out of control. If the government really wanted to do something to reduce health care costs, they’d create a malpractice insurer quango which provides providers and health care institutions with affordable malpractice insurance. And they’d also stand up to the trial lawyers and mandate reasonable caps on med-mal cases.

Then there’s the matter of the fraudulent billing that’s built into the Medicare/Medicaid billing system. Familiarise yourself with “level of service” billing and how that’s administered. You’ll quickly see that a provider can raise the cost to Medicare/Medicaid of a patient visit by as much as four times, simply by asking six questions of the patient during an exam. It doesn’t mean that the provider spent a second more with the patient, or that the patient’s actual health was improved one iota, but Medicare blindly pays up to four times more for the provider to have done that. That’s a system looking to be abused. While we’re talking about billing, let’s consider DRG’s for just a moment. Because of the inclusion of a regional component in the DRG rates, in some areas of the country, providers can’t even recover their costs from certain services. So they raise their charges on non-Medicare/Medicaid patients to subsidise their losses. Oh, and they stop taking on new Medicare/Medicaid patients in order to stop the financial hemorrhaging.

Now the true reformer would have pressed for removing all the consumer-level advertising which Big Pharma builds into the cost of their products and probably some reasonable limits on R&D costs. The true reformer would be looking at changes to tort law which contain the cost of med-mal claims. The true reformer would be looking to find ways to reduce the growth of salaries in health care. The true reformer would be looking to overhaul the Medicare/Medicaid billing system with its inherent flaws.

Is any of that in the 4000-odd pages of legislation that Congress has cranked out? Nope.

Of course we know that health care costs will be reduced in Medicare. Coverage for specific services for everyone will be axed. Reimbursement rates will continue to be held significantly below UCR rates for inpatient and outpatient procedures. Services to the elderly and those who’re no longer contributing will be cut. Specific expensive pharmaceutical treatments will no longer be approved. Pretty soon we’ll have our very own version of the Liverpool Care Pathway to “humanely” kill patients who would cost too much to keep alive.

But since you’re never interested in actual debate, Jackie boy, none of this matters to you. You think you’ve done your part for the liberal cause by coming to this site and dropping your little turdlets of hatred and invective. I guess we all contribute what we’re capable of contributing, eh Jackie?
sabiticus

Funny. They keep trying to sell this thing by saying it’s going to lower costs.

1) When has government controlled anything ever lowered its cost? History is against that notion.

2) How? They never actually specify how costs are going to be lowered. It’s as if the Left expects the costs to just magically decrease once those evil insurance companies are gone, like pixie dust and unicorn farts are involved somehow.

There is a guy I work with whose idea of streamlining processes is to try to shuffle work to other people, rather than improving process efficiency. The thinking is similar. The Left’s idea of making something cost less is to shuffle the actual cost off to someone else. The result is about the same. People who find themselves saddled with more work he has shuffled off resist, and the process is rendered even less efficient by the extra effort of changing hands. People who will find themselves saddled with increased taxes will find ways out, up to and including relocating, and we will also now have the federal government acting as middle man and controller, destroying what efficiency is there.
http://guardian.blogdrive.com/ CavalierX

So, getting back to the Medicare thing, let me get this straight: they’re going to cut over a hundred billion dollars from Medicare, and then expand Medicare coverage? How the hell does that not translate into a massive reduction and then rationing of services? Can any Liberal even attempt to answer that question without mentioning a) George Bush, b) Iraq, c) Republicans or d) any deviant sexual practices or criminal behavior in which they wish to accuse me of indulging? I just want to know how Congress proposes to cut funding for a program and simultaneously expand it without cutting the hell out of whatever services it offers.
Mike_M

“How the hell does that not translate into a massive reduction and then rationing of services?”

That’s what the death panels are for.

Duh.
Pingback: Medicare Buy In? Worst. Idea. Ever. | Right Wing News Buy by about
Mike_M

“an unvarnished, complete victory for people like me who have been arguing for a single-payer system.”

This is why they dropped the pretense of the “public option”. Why create another bureaucracy when their endgame is just to get everyone on Medicare as the single payer system?

One the framework is in place, all that has to be done is to lower the age of eligibility…which will be easy to do since the rest of the bill takes a wrecking ball to private insurance.

These “negotiations” are pure stagecraft. The liberals never wanted a public option, and this whole exercise is designed to fool the casual observer into thinking Congress is producing a “moderate” bill.

Also, why is nobody in the GOP calling the Dems out on this? It’s blindingly obvious to anyone familiar with liberal politics. I think it’s time for me to renew my campaign to run the RNC part time from the comments section of this blog…and still do a better job than the bozos in charge now.
MediumHeadBoy

every day you post here, you reinforce your bona fides as a knee-jerk ideologue

Emphasis on “jerk.”
GDR

From FreedomWorks:

“We still have a chance to defeat this big government monstrosity and preserve one-sixth of our economy from being taken over by the federal government.

The battle in the Senate has reached its most critical point, and we need your help to convince a handful of swing voters in the Senate to vote NO on the Senate bill. Sen. Harry Reid is trying to have a vote to end debate next week. These next few days are crucial, and we need your help! We are hearing that this bill is so unpopular that Sen. Reid and Speaker Pelosi want to avoid normal procedure and skip the usual bicameral conference to reconcile the bills. Instead, the Senate bill may be the final version of Obamacare.

Please TAKE ACTION now to start calling them, and remind them that the American people oppose Obamacare. Also, you will note that the targets have local offices in their states, and we are encouraging people to go sit in these offices every day until we stop this bill. This action will send a powerful message across the country that we are serious about defeating this terrible legislation.

DC Rally and Sit-ins!

Next week, on Tuesday, December 15th, we expect thousands of Americans to come back to Washington for a rally at Upper Senate Park at 1:00pm. At the conclusion of the rally, these citizens will go visit their Senators, and some folks will stay until they get a face-to-face meeting. We will sit in these offices all day if we have to, and will not be denied our right to be heard! If you cannot make it to DC for the sit-ins, please organize local senate office sit-ins in your state. Be sure to send us your pictures and videos! If you’d like to participate in any of these efforts, please contact Juan Hernandez at jhernandez@freedomworks.org (202)-942-7672.”

Now is the time for ACTION against CrappyCare!

If you care about Freedom and Individual Rights now is the time to get involved while we have the opportunity to STOP CRAPPYCARE!!
GDR

Absolutlely superlicious article on whats the real takeover provisions in CrappyCare!:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/printpage/?url=http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/12/10/the_sheer_arrogance_of_obamacare_99479.html

“You Will Lose Your Private Health Insurance
By Robert Tracinski

Well, if they want a debate, let’s let them have it. But let’s not get distracted by the sideshows Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has planned for us.

Forget about abortion. Of course the left will accept restrictions on funding for abortion, because they want to keep moderate Democrats on board for the goal they know is really important: giving the government a dominant role in health care. Everything else is just details, and funding for abortions is an issue to which the left can return at leisure later on-once government is firmly in charge of everything.

And don’t bother debating the “public option,” either, because it’s already dead; enough Democratic senators have come out against it. But Harry Reid is all too happy to have a debate over the public option so he can make a show of “compromising” and giving it up. And while we’re having that fake debate, he’s hoping that we won’t be challenging everything else in the bill.

So let’s get straight what the real essentials of the bill are-and how disastrous they are.

Three provisions constitute the vicious heart of the Democrats’ health-care overhaul.

The first is “guaranteed issue” and “community rating.”…..

The “individual mandate” requires everyone to buy health insurance and subjects us to a tax if we fail to do so……

But the biggest power-grab in the bill is the government takeover of the entire market for health insurance. The bill requires all new policies to be sold on a government-controlled exchange”

I could not have written it any better if I had done it myself!

Please pass this article on to all your friends and family so they will understand how CrappyCare will still be a government HC takeover even without the Government Option!