You will get Medicare. Karl’s wrong. The only question is what the Medicare will consist of. What I see in Canada is that they are happy to give people pills (generics), up to and including and maybe especially pain-killers.
A story to illustrate this: A friend and I were traveling by motorcycle and needed to take a 24 hour ferry trip. He strained his knee really bad muscling his bike on the ferry deck. He mentioned to others on the boat (in B.C.) that he was in pain. Suddenly everyone pullout out pill boxes full of all sorts of stuff. Not one or two people, and not just old people.
What you won’t get are expensive surgeries, or hi-tech cancer therapy, or things like that. You’ll get low cost symptom treatment, pain management, assisted suicide and perhaps hospice care. It will be more like Canada. Stuff like MRI’s will be reserved for young people, and even then there will be waiting lists and qualifications to use them. (And perhaps not for MRI’s: maybe they are already ubiquitous in the USA, but whatever the next great technology is, assuming it is ever developed in the first place).
In summary the government will re-define the benefit, not end it. Much better from a PR point of view.
I’m not sure about that. Older voters are the single biggest voting-bloc in the USA. Politicians of all stripes fear them. Politicians that try cheaping-down Medicare to Canada-type levels will be voted out bigtime. As for the GOP, I’ll believe Republicans want to save money in Medicare when they support the federal government negotiating prices with drug companies (regarding Part D). It’ll never happen. Too many Republican (and ‘rat) friends in Big Pharma.