Expanding Medicare??????????

A new poll conducted by ROC and CNN shows that only 36% of Americans support the Senates Nationalized health care plan. Not only that, but a whopping 61% are flat out against it. That may seem like an extreme swing, but anyone in their right mind should be appalled by the current plan. Senate Democrats in their quest for public admiration, have compromised sanity to get a healthcare bill passed.

In their infinite wisdom, and through a total lack of economic common sense, the Senate has decided to EXPAND Medicare. This news will be sure to please doctors and hospitals, who already believe that Medicare is unsustainable. Medicare currently compensates providers below cost, with many doctors refusing care, and others capping how many patients they can afford to see. Under the Senates compromise Medicare will expand to cover patients as young as 55 years old. This will ensure a massively expanded unfunded mandate on American taxpayers for years to come. To show you just how stupid this plan really is, I have copied an excerpt from the Medicare 2009 annual report.


Medicare's financial difficulties come sooner—and are much more severe—than those confronting Social Security. Underlying health care costs per enrollee are projected to rise faster than the earnings per worker on which payroll taxes and Social Security benefits are based. The fund again fails our test of short-range financial adequacy. The fund also continues to fail our long range test of close actuarial balance by a wide margin. The projected date of HI Trust Fund exhaustion is 2017, two years earlier than in last year's report. Projected HI dedicated revenues fall short of outlays by rapidly increasing margins in all future years. The Medicare Report shows that the HI Trust Fund could be brought into actuarial balance over the next 75 years by changes equivalent to an immediate 134 percent increase in the payroll tax, or an immediate 53 percent reduction in program outlays. The projected exhaustion of the HI Trust Fund within the next eight years is an urgent concern. Congressional action will be necessary to ensure uninterrupted provision of HI services to beneficiaries. Correcting the financial imbalance for the HI Trust Fund—even in the short range alone—will require substantial changes to program income and/or expenditures.


So, I have a plan…LETS EXPAND IT!! This is their dumbest idea yet. Although, it does fit into Obama’s policy of spending your way out of deficits. I really don’t know what else to say, so I’ll finish with a letter from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, and their opinion on the matter:


The current Medicare payment system is financially unsustainable. Any plan to expand Medicare, which is the government’s largest public plan, beyond its current scope does not solve the nation’s health care crisis, but compounds it. We need to fix Medicare by moving it to a system that pays for value – quality health outcomes that are affordable over time – and ensure its success, before bringing more people into a broken system.


Expanding this system to persons 55 to 64 years old would ultimately hurt patients by accelerating the financial ruin of hospitals and doctors across the country. A majority of Medicare providers currently suffer great financial loss under the program. Mayo Clinic alone lost $840 million last year under Medicare. As a result of these types of losses, a growing number of providers have begun to limit the number of Medicare patients in their practices. Despite these provider losses, Medicare has not curbed overall spending, especially after adjusting for benefits covered and the cost shift from Medicare to private insurance. This is clearly an unsustainable model, and one that would be disastrous for our nation’s hospitals, doctors and eventually our patients if expanded to even more beneficiaries.


It’s also clear that an expansion of the price-controlled Medicare payment system will not control overall Medicare spending or curb costs. The Commonwealth Fund has reported this result for Medicare overall by looking at two time periods – one four-year period where Medicare physician fees increased and one four-year period where Medicare physician fees decreased. Overall cost per beneficiary increased at the same rate during each time period. This scenario follows the typical pattern for price controls – reduced access, compromised quality and increasing costs anyway. We need to address these problems – not perpetuate them – through health reform legislation.