Medicare Must Change to Survive

[cthulhubryan]

Medicare must be changed if the program is to survive. Leaving the program on its current trajectory would expose seniors to rationed and restricted care while the reforms that House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan is proposing would actually save and preserve Medicare.

Nonetheless, those who are demagoguing the issue for political gain are pretending that they are going to protect Medicare from any change. But this denies that under the president’s policies; 1) $575 billion will be taken out of Medicare to pay for two new ObamaCare entitlement programs; 2) President Obama gives unprecedented power to an unelected, unaccountable panel of bureaucrats whose sole job is to cut payments for medical care.

The rest of the report here

 

[Holly3278]

I honestly don’t think it will survive. I give us 10 years more maximum before all government funded healthcare programs such as Medicare and Medicaid collapse completely.

 

[JimG]

I honestly don’t think it will survive. I give us 10 years more maximum before all government funded healthcare programs such as Medicare and Medicaid collapse completely.

It is not just Medicare that is unsustainable in the long term, but other benefits such as Medicaid, food stamps, and unemployment checks. If the government does not have sufficient income without borrowing to fund the programs, they become unsustainable. We’ve become pretty spoiled as a nation. So have many others. The proportion of tax paying workers compared to those receiving benefits is decreasing.

The programs can be modified so as to be sustainable for a longer period of time. But if we tilt into a monetary crisis from a national debt default, we may not last long enough even to put those modifications into place.