“Hardly anyone paid in enough to cover their medicare....”
While that is true it is also true what we DID pay into
Medicare we could have invested into money making
endeavors instead. In addition, there are those who
paid into the pool (or whatever it is called) for a
whole career but failed to live long enough to utilize
Medicare after coming of age.
Even including a 5-6% market return most people would have at most saved about $50-$100k, barely a fraction of average healthcare cost in retirement...for people that worked for 30-50 years. Not even counting spouses who didn’t work and those on the dole their whole life, or those who go on SSDI and the like. The fact of the matter is medicare and medicaid are on track to bankrupt the country. Those two programs were about 1% of GDP in 1960 and today cost nearly 10%, and still growing at a cost of 8% annually. The money simply isn’t there if it keeps growing 8%.