CRAIGforCONGRESS

Missouri's 7th District, U.S. House of Representatives

  
 

 

 

Congressional Issues 2010
MORALITY AND CULTURE
Medicare



Medicare ALERT
    If you're under 45, forget about Medicare. You're not getting any. The system is bankrupt.
    The estimated deficit in Medicare as of fiscal 2008 is approximately $70 trillion (with a T). See the Congressional testimony of Prof. Kent Smetters.
    If you are willing to view a balanced, brief presentation using about 30 simple graphs to describe that is inevitably going to happen, click here.
Medicare's Hospital Program Went Broke in 2008. Nobody Noticed.
Accounts Overdrawn: The Bankruptcy of the Social Security/Medicare System
A Moving Federal Chart that Illuminates the Future of Social Security and Medicare
Private health insurance?
    See our Social Security page. Congress deliberately intends to pay off benefits with worthless inflated currency. So, relax, you'll get your benefits -- they just won't be worth anything, and you won't be able to buy anything.

The 112th Congress should:

  • offer a simplified set of flexible medical savings account options to all Americans;
  • provide a fixed-dollar tax credit option to taxpayers who purchase health insurance;
  • expand consumer choices that increase market-based accountability by health plans, instead of enacting a patients’ bill of rights;
  • fundamentally restructure Medicare to expand competitive private health plan choices.
  • not add comprehensive prescription drug benefits to Medicare unless and until it enacts structural reform of the entire program;

  • encourage states to adjust Medicaid eligibility criteria and covered benefits to serve fewer nondisabled, lower-income individuals—but then provide remaining beneficiaries with higher-quality core health services and make greater use of cost-sharing incentives;

  • facilitate state efforts to adapt defined-contribution-style financing as an option for Medicaid beneficiaries;

  • offer a simplified set of flexible medical savings account options to all Americans;

  • provide a tax credit option for taxpayers who choose to purchase health insurance that is not sponsored by their employers;

  • expand consumer choices that increase market-based accountability of health plans; and

  • improve access to health care through incentives to purchase less-comprehensive insurance, expand high-risk pool coverage, finance charitable safety net care, and deregulate state insurance regulation.


Would it be extravagant for a political candidate to promise a healthcare system in which:

  • low-cost health insurance is available to virtually everyone -- including people with existing medical problems;
  • doctors have the time to understand your problems and know you personally -- and even make house calls;
  • a hospital stay costs only a few days' pay, rather than many months of your income;
  • charity hospitals are available to take care of families that can't afford the low-cost hospitals; and
  • free clinics take care of the everyday medical problems of people too poor to afford regular doctors.

This is exactly the healthcare system we had in America until the mid-1960s. It was then that the federal government moved in -- with Medicare, Medicaid, the HMO Act, and tens of thousands of regulations on doctors, hospitals, and health-insurance companies. That's when health care started going downhill.


Medicare Links:

Why not real health-care reform?


"Medicare for All"



next: Social Security