Medicare recipients are getting tens of thousands of dollars, if not more, in benefits for a trivial contribution.
If it's not free, it's almost free.
current ones are.
but people under 40, by the time they are 65, will not.
Medicare has very stringent oversight on what is covered and what is not covered and their biggest downfall has been now encouraging preventive treatment and requiring some treatments that could be performed in the physicans office be done in a hospital at a great dollar amount.
Most doctors (I work for one) accept Medicare which means they accept what medicare deems fair for a procedure or visit and are required to write off the difference, Many times hospitals have a very large write off as a result of this differential between what private insurance pays and medicare or medicaid pay.
Most people on SS as well as Medicare would have a great deal of money, at retirement, for both living and private insurance if they had been allowed to invest the money, paid in over the years, instead of congress rolling it into the general fund and squandering it... most of the generation had to pay into SS AND private investments in order to guarantee a decent retirement.
Your generation should be pushing, hard, to get control over how the fund is administered in the future instead of grousing over the people who currently benefit from it.
If it's not free, it's almost free.