Considering all the things the federal government has done, calling the Medicare prescription drug benefit the "most fiscally irresponsible legilation since the 1960s" is really saying something:
He argues that the federal government would need to have $8 trillion today, invested at treasury rates, to cover the gap between what the program is expected to take in and what it is expected to cost in the next 75 years — and that is in addition to more than $20 trillion that will be needed to pay for other parts of Medicare.
"We can't afford to keep the promises we've already made, much less to be piling on top of them," he tells Kroft.
The problem is the baby boomers. The 78 million people born between 1946 and 1964 start becoming eligible for Social Security benefits next year.
Maybe someone can explain the logic of an administration that kept warning us that Social Security was going bust, then took action to gurarantee that Medicare will lead us into bankruptcy even faster.
But as a boomer, I'm happy to do my part to break the country. Keep those pills ready for me, kids.
Comments
Politicians love to scare people by telling them Social Security and Medicare are going to go bust and it's the other party's fault.
I don't listen to it anymore. If they can find the money to fund an unpopular war that nobody wants, then they'll certainly find a way to fund the two entitlement programs that everybody wants.
I've said it before, and I'll say it here too. The system has been broken for a long time, and a core problem is that the providers price medicines and services as if their consumers were insurance companies, not the American people.
When you make the choice to price your product solely for the wallets of your multi-billion-dollar buyers, what the retail consumers can afford to pay ceases to have any relevance.
Strange as it may seem, we Americans are NOT the medical industry's customers.
The insurance companies are.
And that means what insurance companies can afford to pay determines "what the market will bear."
That's why American consumers can't afford to pay for our own treatments.