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If you will look at Southack's post above mine, you will see that the cost is listed. In order to increase the funding, there will have to be new legislation passed.

The time when you could convince the American people that the elderly should pay for their own health care is past. We are not going to be able to abolish Medicare. Not only do seniors want it, but their children count on it as well. Accepting that as a reality, the problem becomes how to make the thing both effective and manageable.

Given that the baby-boom generation is approaching retirement and that many of them (probably a majority) will have little medical coverage other than Medicare, you want to decrease the costs to Medicare. That is what the medical savings accounts, prescription drug coverage, and privatization are designed to do.

Let me explain this using a diabetic as an example. Diabetes drug are fairly expensive. Until this bill, they were not paid for. The RESULTS of diabetes (heart attack, stroke, amputation, kidney failure, and blindness) cost huge amounts to the system in surgeries, therapies, and rehabilitation. Compare the cost of diabetes drugs to the cost of kidney dialysis and eventual transplant, and you can begin to understand why the prescription drug coverage is necessary.

Rush has the luxury of having large amounts of money and need not deal with these issues. For poorer adult seniors, this is not the case. Eventually those poorer seniors become burdens on the system anyway, and at a much higher cost.

Well-stated defenses of the Medicare spending, my FRiends, although I still believe we couldda written legislation that covered the 1.5 million folks who have the problems paying for prescription drugs without creating an expensive entitlement for all 42 million seniors (most of whom are already covered for their drugs).

In any event, I hope Dubyuh and his advisors and the GOP Congress get the undeniable message that conservatives are rightly concerned with their free-spending record over the last three years!! There's still time to right their ship before next November...and if they do, I can foresee a Reagan'84-like landslide fer the GOP in the offing!!

FReegards...MUD

The time when you could convince the American people that the elderly should pay for their own health care is past.

I am honestly perplexed as to why you would say this.
Sure, you're statement would ring true if it was asked to folks 65 yrs and older.
But you might be surprised at the response from those 30 yrs old and below.