look how medicare destroyed the health system.....Grandpa's PHx was going to be paid for and be FREE so suddenly, PHx was the rage ..
..as were a million presciptions, xrays,home visits, power chairs,etc etc...
when grandpa's health care became almost free for him, it sent the prices for the rest of us sky high....and we're the ones still footing the bill in every way.
when there is a bottomless pit of money, you can bet it will be sucked up with gusto.....just look at college expenses....price increases for several decades high above the inflation rate....why?....Uncle Sam is the bottomless pit.
What a clueless assertion.
Medicare did not destroy the health system! Medicaid did. And that was a NEW massive unfunded welfare program.
THAT'S WHAT DESTROYED MEDICARE.
My fundamental belief is that Medicare is the problem, and that Obamacare is simply one of the results.
And you are quite correct about what you call “free”, although that’s not the real problem.
The core of the Medicare distortion of reality is the promise to pay, without limit, for anything that might possibly be useful. The static analysis that gave birth to Medicare looked at what the over 65 cohort spent on medical and nursing services 1955-64, and reasoned that that would be the cost/year going forward.
But the promise to pay without limit led to the creation of an enormous industry that has created many interesting and useful things.
No senior citizen crippled by a bad hip would have paid $60 000 for a new one in 1958. Or, more exactly, there were not enough seniors in 1958 with that kind of money to justify the R&D necessary to create an industry producing safe, highly functional, and long-lasting joint replacements. But once EVERY senior had the $60 000, guaranteed, it made sense to turn American inventiveness and entrepreneurialism loose on the problem.
And, the same is true for auto sensing pacemakers, implantable defibrillators, stents, advanced eye surgery, molecular mimicry, individualized anti-cancer antibodies, etc, etc.
None of that would have happened without the government’s promise to pay without limit.
But, of course, payment without limit for all possibly useful things has meant that we cannot have a budget. And, since we could not have a budget after 1965, we first had to ditch silver coins, then the dollar-gold fix, then the debt limit. Prior to an attempt at fixed payments for certain things in 1986, Medicare could just print the extra money needed, but since then, it has proven necessary to borrow most of it from China.
Yes, of course in any system that pays without limit and without a budget, there is fraud and abuse. But, in the case of Medicare, that’s froth on the water. The real problem is that, if we doctors can invent something, however costly, the government will pay for it. And we can invent a lot of things.
Medicare still fights death as it’s prime directive. 100% of Medicare in-hospital deaths are investigated. And that in a population whose cumulative mortality rate is 100%. Everybody dies.
Medicare cannot be fixed as it presently exists.