If you lower the eligibility age of Medicare to 50,before disease gains tractability, add Child Medicare till the age of 21 and an Acute Medicare for those ages in between, the nation will greatly reduce medical costs, acute care and emergency, due to prevention alone. This is the simple cost-benefit ratio, not to mention greater productivity from a healthy population.

Arguments against the government bogey man and universal health insurance are specious and dysfunctional, unless you want to discuss the back-door tax that Republicans and “counterfeit conservatives” have levied with the $11.6 trillion national debt. The “free lunch” they promised, no new taxes and tax cuts, in order to gain power, costs this country over $3.5 trillion per decade in debt interest payments; from 3 cents in 1980 to over 14 cents of every tax dollar today. That is a 14% share of every tax dollar without denting the principal.

The socialized losses of the “free market” meltdown, trillions, contrasted with the “efficient” free market bonuses for subsidized bankers, billions,leads to the twisted logic that universal healthcare costs too much.Until we value people before money, we the public, will continue to lose both.

Prima Facie offers a false statement when it says you must visit your doctor every 30 days under Medicare. I visit my primary care physician once a year for an annual checkup, and my cardiologist (I have six prescriptions) every six months. There are too many lies about Medicare, which pays far less than private plans for coverage. A private plan will authorize $10,000 for an operation that Medicare will only pay $4,000. Both are accepted. And if you had no insurance, they would charge $20,000.

Permit me to clarify and reiterate… The less-than-total fee coverage of Medicare, the need for “Medi-Gap” insurance, and other inefficiencies Medicare is accused of stem not from its being a government function, but rather being yet another example of private interests arranging things to their advantage to feed off the public trough.  As I said previously, Medicare was built upon the highly expensive, highly inefficient cost-based, fee-for-service model of medical care (because that is all the AMA would allow), and was notably devoid of innovation in financing and organizing medical care, again because the AMA and those of similar sentiment (including the American Hospital Association) would not permit any change in the game that has worked so well to its favor in the absence of the countervailing influence of government (see Medicare Part D as a very recent illustration of this). 

Inevitably government is excoriated for this, when in actuality it is the private sector that is responsible for the staggering inefficiencies, inequities, and resistance to meaningful health care reform in this country, while placing its financial interests above the health of the country.

Also as I said previously, Medicare compares poorly to what other societies THROUGH THEIR GOVERNMENT provide to their citizenry, it’d be illustrative to see what they have achieved having pushed cynicism, ideology, misconceptions, and straw men aside to get down to the serious work of providing health care to all members of their respective societies.

Oh, Medicare has been a huge success. If by success you mean a bloated, inefficient mess that doesn’t pay its bills in a timely fashion and is rapidly losing contracted providers.

And we’ll never know what it really costs. Medicare funding, like war spending and other welfare programs, are don’t off budget! It’s true costs aren’t reflected in the deficit—even in the mythical Clinton “balanced budget.”

Medicare only pays 80 percent of its “allowed” fee for a given procedure, which rarely covers actual costs and which almost requires a patient to carry secondary insurance to make up the difference. You think insurance providers are notorious for dragging their feet on authorization? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Medicare also requires a patient to see his doctor every 30 days for continuing treatment, even if all you need is a blood-pressure prescription refill or gain approval for more physical therapy following hip surgery.

And then there’s the third-party agent that handles authorizations and payments. If a provider gets paid within three or four months of an actual procedure, he’s ahead of the game.

Because of these and other requirements, more and more doctors, therapists and other providers are rejecting Medicare patients. Why take that business if you only get a fraction of what you’re owed and you don’t see payment for months on end? It’s not worth it.

So, yeah, Medicare is wondrous success. Heaven forbid other government functions operated the same way.

Oh, wait…

For certain the laudatory purpose of Medicare to provide social insurance for at least a segment of the population should not be minimized, but its example must not be overextended, and it must be tempered with the realization that Medicare could have been so much more than it is, and still in comparison to what other societies provide, it is still quite modest, and still terribly expensive.

The reason for this is that Medicare was built upon the conventional Blue Cross/Blue Shield reimbursement methods, and it could do nothing to reorganize the way health care was delivered.  (The historical background for this extends to compromising with the strong oppostion from the AMA, and funding the Viet Nam war.)  The result is that Medicare has been demonstrably lacking in innovation in the financing and organizing of health care, with a consequent lack of cost control discipline, and thus Medicare has been a major driver of medical cost inflation since its inception.  Tremendous amounts of Federal money were poured into a fragmented, highly inefficient private model of care.  Indeed, some sage and wry observers of health care policy have deemed Medicare “the physician income guarantee and retirement security act.”

The INTENT of Medicare for society to take care of its own through social insurance should be pursued; the EXAMPLE of Medicare in its financing and organization of care should not, we need better, more responsive, more accountable, more efficient ways to cover our population.

Its amazing how these lies can continued to be told in light of the evidence.  Medical costs have sky-rocketed because of programs like medicare and medicaid which foster fraud and waste. Medicare is a total failure. It has led to doctors and medical facilities finding new and improved ways to defraud the taxpayer.

The inability of this nation’s leadership and intelligentsia to properly frame problems coupled with politically and ideologically induced stupidity, threaten the autonomic well being of this nation

Reducing the age of eligibility for medicare to 50, before diseases gain tractability, will drastically lower acute care and emergency care medical costs all along the line. Introduce a Child Medicare program to age 21, and again medical costs will be reduced. Add an acute Medicare program for those falling between these age groups and yet again medical costs will go down.Cost-benefit analysis anyone? As Ms. Cocco underscores, the administrative infrastructure is in place, the process is proven and the customers are satisfied, why reinvent the wheel? For profit, for profit, for profit and smug satisfaction with the obstruction.

If we have a proper National Health Care system Medicare would be redundant, but it is also clear that the Corporate Health Industry is trying its best to destroy even a hint of National Health Care, as they have done all along.

We give our elected National Political figures the best socialized health system anywhere and the rest of the people are picked over by the for profits like a dead body being picked over by vultures. And, that is all the opposition has to offer.

Successful? At what? Bankrupting an economy? Check! Closing factories and shedding american jobs? Check! Buying votes with someone else’s money? Check!

Being one whit of good for the COUNTRY? hahahahahahah