Medicare explained

Unworkable by design:

The federal government is set to cut Medicare spending on older Americans and also to extract more Medicare taxes from younger Americans who can’t get any benefit from the program.

“Medicare is totally flying under the radar,” Dr. Lee Vliet, a preventive medicine physician with practices in Arizona and Texas, tells Breitbart News.

“Medicare is a single payer system in that funding comes from the taxpayers, but it is like Obamacare in preserving a lucrative role for private cronies, who receive the government money and disburse it,” Vliet explains. “When Medicare was enacted there was immediate trouble with an explosion in costs, resulting in an almost immediate violation of the original legislative promise of no interference with physician decision-making, or with their compensation.”

Older Americans on Medicare have faced big out-of-pocket costs that are about to get even bigger. In a report on Obamacare’s sixth year, Heritage Foundation health policy expert Dr. Robert Moffit notes that President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare reform would cut $715 billion from Medicare over the next decade to help pay for Obamacare.

“It is logically impossible to cut payments for Medicare services without affecting seniors who depend on those services,” Moffit writes, observing that in their 2015 report, the Medicare Trustees confirmed the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Chief Actuary’s concerns about the severe impact of Medicare healthcare provider payment reductions on older Americans’ access to healthcare.

The CMS Actuary projected that by 2040, most hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and home health agencies will become unprofitable, leading to a significant reduction in access to healthcare for older Americans.

“Few seniors have complained about the lack of an alternative, or the fact that seniors must enroll in Medicare Part A if they want their Social Security benefits,” Vliet observes. “The question is: Will Medicare be able to continue to provide the care today’s seniors expect? The answer is an unequivocal NO.”

Medicare is a government-run ponzi scheme, enacted by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, which shifts the cost of healthcare for current older Americans on to younger working Americans.

In addition to the problem of increasing restrictions on healthcare for Americans on Medicare, there is the other dilemma of forcing younger, working Americans to pay for current Medicare recipients’ health needs even though the Medicare program will unlikely be there for them when it is their turn to retire. The question remains whether younger Americans should be able to save for their own retirement healthcare rather than be forced to pay taxes into a declining Medicare system.

Americans must sign onto Medicare Part A – which covers hospitalization – when they turn 65, or else forfeit their Social Security benefits. Unelected bureaucrats created this rule in the 1990s during the Clinton administration, even though the actual Social Security or Medicare legislations say nothing about such a requirement. A lawsuit aimed at decoupling the two programs failed in 2012, leaving any remedy of the situation up to Congress.
Physician and Arizona state Sen. Dr. Kelli Ward (R) – who is running a primary challenge against incumbent U.S. Sen. John McCain, tells Breitbart News, “Unelected bureaucrats have no business forcing government-controlled healthcare on Americans who choose other options.”
“Holding hostage a major portion of a worker’s lifetime earnings is not only unethical – a fiduciary dollar is a fiduciary dollar – it is also in this case entirely unconstitutional,” Ward adds. “I enthusiastically agree with Senator Mike Lee that all regulatory burdens proposed by executive branch agencies must be approved by Congress as required by Article I of the Constitution: ‘All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress’ actually means ALL ‘legislative powers.’”

“Why would the government want to force people to take this Medicare benefit?” Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and a specialist in internal medicine, tells Breitbart News. “Soon after Medicare was passed, Johnson wanted to force people into Medicare Part A because he wanted his program to succeed and he expected it wouldn’t if people still had the option to purchase private insurance.” 

She continues:

And so Johnson basically talked all the insurance companies into cancelling policies for everybody over the age of 65. People were thus forced into Medicare. The financing of Medicare from the beginning was designed to fail or to be a ponzi scheme. I don’t think they foresaw the dramatic change in the demographics that have occurred, but nevertheless, in the way it was structured, money was never set aside, it was never invested for the people who were putting their money into it. It was always set up to depend upon new taxpayers.

At the time Medicare was signed into law, the average life expectancy was approximately 69 years. Because of advances in medicine, many seniors in 2016 are living well into their 80s and beyond. 

“Longevity has definitely improved and, in addition, the baby boomers didn’t have enough children,” Orient says. “Now we’re down to two or fewer working people supporting each and every retired person. This is a burden the younger generation cannot sustain.”

The idea of opting out of Medicare, however, often raises objections from both those who believe they are entitled to the government-run health care program because they paid taxes into it while they were working, and those who would simply prefer to have the government “take care” of healthcare for them.

Orient says older Americans who believe they are “entitled” to Medicare because they paid into the system aren’t understanding how the ponzi scheme works. In addition, with Medicare about to be even further restricted, current recipients will be in for a rude awakening as soon as next year when the program will feel even more like a burden to be endured.

“People are in denial, particularly about the fiscal realities of Medicare,” she continues. “Bernie Sanders may say that he wants to put everybody in Medicare, and his program has been estimated to cost from anywhere between $2 trillion to $14 trillion. Where is that money going to come from? The fact is it doesn’t exist! It’s hard to believe anyone would have confidence in such a plan.”

Vliet agrees that some are not understanding the realities about Medicare.

“Some people are looking at Medicare as it has been, not as it will be under the new rules, which don’t even really kick in until 2017,” she explains. “When people see that Medicare will be broke and thus will be restricting many more procedures that they may need, as well as hospital readmissions, etc. – and it will get worse when Obamacare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board gets here in 2017 – they will want some other options.”

So make the conscious choice not to be part of the cattle-masses yelling, "Hey, this was promised to me!" while in the remaining human part of your brain you know the program's "sustainability" has long been exhausted.