I understand your thinking, and have 40+ years of contributions myself, but the typical Medicare recipient receives about $4 in service for each dollar put in.
It’s truly an unsustainable Ponzi scheme.
Really?
Would the cost be 4/1 if there was no Medicaid?
I’m sick of people who decide it’s suddenly perfectly fine to raid the accounts of those who paid, for those who don’t.
I suspect that figure will go up in the near future NOT because of the elderly Medicare recipients, but rather those who have flooded the social security disability plan when they could not find a job and their unemployment ran out. They are eligible for medicare after 2 years.
You do realize that medicare part B is subtracted from the retiree's social security check (about $110 monthly now) and we also pay for supplemental plans.
To date, Medicare has paid for one pneumonia shot and three flu shots for me. Total expenditures.
Does that include the cost of money over time?
I've seen far too many "cost-benefit" analyses that simply add up contributions over the past 40 years, and add up the benefits over the expected lifetime, and declare they are "equal" or "better".
This doesn't account for the cost of money over time -- particularly during the 80's. During that period, government bonds were paying double digit interest rates.
I've done the calculations: I've contributed about $270K so far, but if I had invested those contributions in long-term government bonds at the prevailing interest rate each year, I would have collected about $580K in dividends. That's $750K now, and it would just about double by the time I start collecting benefits, even at the low bond rates today.
The cost of money also figures into benefits. In order to value it correctly, you have to pick a point in time, like retirement, and calculate the present value of the future benefits. It is a smaller number than the sum of the payments, just like the balance of your car loan at the beginning is smaller than the sum of all your future payments.