guaranteed losing issue. People who wanted to vote for Romney voted against him just because of Paul Ryan wanting to tamper with Medicare...after Bush W lost Congress wanting to “partially privatize Social Security”....which Democrats & their ubliquitous media said was “gambling your money away on the stock market, so their friends on Wall Street could get richer.” Fact is, the American people LIKE SS and Medicare and we already have partially privatized Social Security in the form of IRAs and 401K plans. People don’t want Republicans messing with Medicare—which exists because free markets are ammoral, not moral-—and cannot solve every problem. People get old & infirm, get sick , injured, diseased and die. Either markets ration goods and services by price mechanism & risk——or the government does-——or else government helps people the market prices out of the system because they are bigger risk for sickness and death because of nature and nature’s God through no fault of their own. Old people couldn’t get insurance, which is why Medicare was created. By all means, debate the issue of what government should or shouldn’t do-—but drop the dogma & ideology. Just like we don’t have privatized street lights, lighthouses and traffic lights, cops, etc-——people didn’t like when GOP started running for office against the U.S. Postal Service and the people it employs. Trump got elected because people are sick of rigid ideology & anti-government hatred. Paul Ryan needs to chill. He cost us one election and the last thing we need is to lose the House in the midterm elections because probably Trump will not run for a second term.
According to Malcolm Sparrow, a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, Medicare “overpayments” due to fraud and abuse may be as high as 30%. With a $600 billion cost that means as much as $180 billion is overpaid. At some point in the future the cost of Medicare will simply overwhelm the federal budget. At that point I suspect severe rationing will be imposed.
We need something different that eliminates such an easy target for fraud and abuse.