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Medicare is Digging a Big Hole for America

With the economic shape that Medicare and Medicaid are in, how can anyone expect that the federal government can provide universal health care?

Yesterday on The Right Balance with Greg Allen, Pete Sepp of the National Taxpayers Union made the statement that for the first time, this year, Medicare depends more on the federal government's general fund for its funding than it does on payroll taxes.

Stated differently, Medicare payroll taxes as now constituted pay for less than half of the costs of Medicare.

Should we raise Medicare payroll taxes? I don't think so.

With this news, how can the government possibly think it can provide an effective service in the arena of universal health care?
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Comments

  1. Connor11/30/2007 10:01:00 AM

    Gotta love socialism. Everybody wants a piece of the pie.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Frank Staheli11/30/2007 10:03:00 AM

    And because they're not paying for it, they want a bigger piece than everyone else.

    ReplyDelete
  3. rmwarnick12/01/2007 10:49:00 AM

    If Medicare could be extended to universal health care, it would be cheaper and better than the current "system," which is total chaos.

    Why can't the Democrats come out and say that? Because some clown on Fox News might call them socialists.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Frank Staheli12/01/2007 02:47:00 PM

    I'll save you the trouble of watching Fox news--it IS socialism.

    How it can be chaos now and not be chaos when the government controls all of it is beyond me.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Scott Hinrichs12/01/2007 04:20:00 PM

    Because then the government will control every bit of the system, including who gets what and when, comrade.

    Do they have chaotic systems in countries with "universal" health care? Not always, because Big Brother is there to make sure you don't jump ahead in the 3½-year-long line to get a hip replacement. There just is no other option. We already have a heavily socialized system. It's just that part of it is privatized. That doesn't mean it isn't socialized. And yet we have chaos.

    Socialists have long whined that free market systems are chaotic, simply because they cannot be controlled. Free markets seem chaotic because there are so many moving parts controlled by so many tiny entities that it's difficult (impossible?) to wrap your mind around them. This kind of "chaos" is self organizing. It is not bad. The chaos we have today is because we refuse to allow the free market to function.

    ReplyDelete

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