"The agency (Medicare) provides health insurance to 98 million people, pays 1.2 billion claims a year and has an annual budget of more than $700 billion. It has a pervasive influence on medical care, regulating hospitals, doctors, health plans, laboratories and almost every other type of health care provider. When Medicare decides to cover a new treatment or adopts a new payment policy, private insurers often follow its lead." ("Lack of Medicare Appointee Puzzles Congress"; New York Times, August 17, 2009).
Or will the current Medicare recipients be grandfathered, as it were? If Medicare is cancelled, what's going to happen to those niney-eight million people? Most of 'em probably can't get, or can't afford, private insurance. Heck, the private insurance companies didn't want them to begin with; that's why they let the government create Medicare in the first place. So they could charge an arm 'n a leg to insure the healthy, and then turn them over to a tax-supported system when they started to need expensive health care.
A caution: when people have to loot their childrens' education funds, hock the house, risk bankruptcy, all to provide medical care to Granny, who is now without insurance, those currently mythical Euthanasia Chambers out behind the local hospital are going to start looking like a good idea.
On the plus side: the Medicare Trust Fund won't be running out of money.
On another plus side: the George W. Bush Medicare Prescription Drug (Company) Benefit, dedicated to shelling out the greatest possible amount of tax dollars to Big Pharma, won't be giving your tax dollars away, either.
Saved From Socialized Medicine! Thank God Almighty! Also Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Fox "News", et. alia.
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