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February 10, 2012
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January 30, 2012
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Jeannine Stein: Mental illness struck one in five U.S. adults in 2010: Report
January 25, 2012
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Ali Safi: U.S. envoy gives Taliban terms for peace talks
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January 9, 2012
Michael Doyle: Put through legal hell over dream home, couple fought back hard --- all the way to Supreme Court
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Jewish World Review
Oct. 30, 2009
/ 12 Mar-Cheshvan 5770
The Biggest Ponzi Scheme Ever A Fact Check on Medicare
By
Michael Arnold Glueck
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Some say Medicare is immensely popular and has very low administrative costs.
Therefore why not just have Medicare for all?
First, since fact checks are currently in vogue (only against the right), let's do
a fact check on Medicare:
IT IS STRUCTURED AS A PONZI SCHEME. Maybe we should call it a Madoff scheme? Its unfunded liabilities-an estimated
$38 trillion-are unpayable. Promises made to Baby Boomers, who were forced to
pay into the system throughout their working lives, simply cannot be kept. Their
money is gone just like that of Madoff's "investors."
IT IS SUSTAINED BY THE GENERAL FUND AND BY COST-SHIFTING. Medicare Part B
premiums pay only about 25% of the cost; the rest must be made up from the
general fund. In addition, Medicare underpays hospitals and physicians, and
costs are shifted to private insurers. The hidden tax on private insurers to
subsidize Medicare and Medicaid amounts to $89 billion/year, or $1,788 per
average family in a PPO plan (Grace-Marie Turner and Joseph Antos, Wall St J
9/11/09).
IT IS UNFAIR TO BOTH PATIENTS AND PHYSICIANS. Payments to physicians are often
so paltry that patients are having increasing difficulty in finding a physician
who can afford to see them. Coverage of prolonged serious illness is poor;
seniors who exceed the allowed number of hospital days are plum out of luck.
Neither is Medicare a model for comprehensive coverage of non-catastrophic
costs. Seniors pay 50% of their medical bills out of pocket, and most buy
supplemental coverage (ibid.).
THE SYSTEM IS RIFE WITH FRAUD (often by the government!)). An anti-fraud
campaign went into high gear with the passage of the Kassebaum-Kennedy, Health
Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996.
Hundreds of millions of dollars were made available to prosecutors, along with
huge penalties and new tools including a fraud hotline, bounties of up to 30% of
amounts collected, and money laundering charges on which the accused can be
convicted without first being found guilty of any underlying fraud. THIS AMOUNTED TO A
POST-HOC CRIMINALIZATION OF MEDICINE.
Still, despite allocating $1.13 billion for "program-integrity" and enforcement
activities in 2008, government-wide "improper payments" allegedly amounted to
$72 billion that year, writes John Iglehart (N Engl J Med 7/6/09). "In our
freewheeling society driven by capitalism, there is a strong distaste in many
quarters for overzealous investigations," Iglehart opines.
While physicians may be ruined or even imprisoned over alleged coding errors of
a few dollars, the threshold for investigating a Medicare carrier is $200
million (Theresa Burr, J Am Phys Surg, winter 2003).
GOVERNMENT CARE COSTS MUCH MORE. The passage of Medicare led to an immediate,
enormous jump in spending. Between the introduction of Medicare in 1965, and
1970, real hospital expenditures jumped 23 % reports Linda Gorman (Library of
Economics and Liberty 6/1/09).
Since 1970, Medicare's per-patient costs have risen 35% more, and Medicaid's 34%
more, than all other medical care in America. This analysis greatly
underestimates the cost of government care by counting all Medicare
prescription-drugs purchases as part of private care. It also does not account for
billions of dollars in cost shifting from Medicaid to SCHIP; and counting care
purchased privately by Medicare and Medicaid patients (Jeffrey H. Anderson, New
York Post 7/18/09).
MEDICARE TAXES IMPOSE UNCOUNTED COSTS. Among the hidden costs of government
programs is the deadweight cost of taxation. The taxes that finance the Medicare
program impose costs on society in the range of 30% of total Medicare spending
(Michael Tanner, Cato Policy Analysis #642; Aug 6, 2009).
One of the solutions proposed by ObamaCare is to cut Medicare funding by 500
billion dollars. How do you take that much money from a program that is already
broke? There are currently 44 million Medicare recipients. Do the math and this
amounts to slashing roughly $11,400 from each Medicare patient over ten
years. This tidy sum is equal to the cost of caring for one senior for one year.
What year of your remaining life would you like that to be?
So if you like the risk of Ponzi schemes you will love investing in "The Obama-NonCare
Plan."
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Michael Arnold Glueck, M.D., writes on medical, legal and allied social issues in numerous newspapers, magazines and journals locally, nationally and internationally. He is widely quoted in the media.
Comment by clicking here.
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