Posted on 07/23/2015 6:57:10 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Greece owes $320 billion to its creditors and cannot repay the loans. Like Greece, Medicare is also accumulating an unaffordable mountain of debt. And both Greece and Medicare are more likely to default on their debts than to adopt the highly unpopular reforms needed to pay them off.
Wednesday's news from the Medicare Trustees may not seem that dire.
The headline is comforting, but misleading. Medicare's Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund-also known as Part A-will run short of money, but not until 2030. Starting that year, Part A benefits can be paid out only to the extent that money comes into the trust fund, mostly from payroll taxes. That's the same date predicted by the Trustees last year, so Medicare's financial situation does not seem to be worsening.
But the HI depletion date tells only part of the story. Medicare also pays for physician and outpatient services under Part B and prescription drugs under Part D. Because Part B and Part D automatically receive additional funding from general revenues, they remain solvent indefinitely. But that does not mean we don't have to worry about the rising costs of those benefits.
In fact, we are seeing a shift of Medicare services out of the hospital and into outpatient settings that are often more convenient for the patient and more cost-effective for the program. Part A services accounted for 50 percent of Medicare spending in 2008. By 2014, that share had fallen to 44 percent. That shift of spending makes Part A's financial outlook better because the money is being spent in other parts of the program that do not have insolvency dates.
We can see this more clearly by examining the funds flowing into and out of the program.
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearmarkets.com ...
Medicare’s only for those old, washed-up gringos isn’t it?
So what’s the big deal?
Liberals are all agog about sustainability so why the silence here. Makes no sense.
All those old gringos won’t mind letting their diabetes, cancers, heart disease, go untreated because the money formerly for Medicare is needed to import more poor illiterate democrat voters.
Obamacare will fail first and it will all get rolled into one big single payer scheme.
Despite the insistence of the left, there isn’t a true single payer system in the developed world. All of the state-dominated health systems are two-tiered. France, with its “Medicare for all” style system, has a more robust supplemental insurance market than the US. Even Canada, supposedly a “single payer” system, has a 70/30 public/private split of health care payment. This is in comparison to the US, which is 50/50 public/private.
Regardless of what happens, there will be numerous ways around subjecting oneself to state control of health decisions. Ex-US medical tourism will explode even if there is a clamp-down by the government in concert with “private” payers.
Save your pennies, though. The emerging science of ultra-longevity will benefit the elite only...
Hola Mexicare. All the care, none of the gringos.
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