Shafting Elders on Medical Care and Retirment Income?
U.S. health care is outrageously expensive. As the following website implies, games are being played with the numbers, but apart from cleaning up the abuses of Medicare by doctors overcharging and keeping everyone covered in the future there is no problem in paying for care for all — a single payer system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_the_United_States
The same is true for social security. There is money in that bank which would carry us through 2140 and we simply need to up the pay level for those well off to adjust to variable finances in the future:
http://blog.accountingcoach.com/social-security-tax-rate-2010/
“The Social Security tax withheld from employees during the year 2010 will be 6.2% of the first $106,800 of each employee’s taxable earnings. The employee’s earnings in excess of $106,800 are not subject to the Social Security tax. In addition to the Social Security tax, the entire amount of each employees’ taxable earnings is subject to the Medicare tax of 1.45%”
Needless to say our national government has the powers and obligation to make such things work for us. Our competing democracies are way ahead on such things at far greater savings and democratic justice for all!
We should be a democacy and not a plutocracy run by and for the super rich!!!!
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“A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope.” (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
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Ed Kent [blind copies]
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2 users commented in " Shafting Elders on Medical Care and Retirment Income? "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackThe one problem with that is that neither Congress nor the White House would ever consider giving up their medical coverage for the bare, bones, one size fits all single payer system. Yes the same type of system that has failed miserably in Britain and other Europeans countries. Even President Obama is at a loss to find a country in which single-payer is a viable option.
“You might have heard a few days ago President Barack Obama said ‘There are countries where a single-payer system works pretty well.’ The only problem is, no one knows what countries those are.
Neither, apparently, does Obama’s Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.
From CNS News:
‘I don’t know exactly the countries. I think if you talk to the people in the countries that have that system, they think their health care is pretty good,’ White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told CNSNews.com Wednesday during the daily press briefing.
Asked again if he knew specifically which countries, Gibbs replied: ‘I assume Canada, Britain, maybe France. I don’t know the exact countries, but again, I don’t think the president is going way out on a limb that some people in other countries have a health care system that they like. Just as some Americans like the health care system that they have.’”
source: http://www.dakotavoice.com/2009/06/the-mystery-of-countries-where-single-payer-health-care-works/
there are overcharging by docs on medicaid, but actually a survey showed that actually docs tend to underbill in 40 percent of billings for fear of being charged with “overbilling”.
The billing stuff is complicated, and a lot of us resent taking time looking up the right “code” number for a complicated case, and instead merely bill for the less complicated problem, and then we’re zapped for overbilling.
If I see Mrs. Kingbird for Diabetes, with neuropathy, nephropathy, chronic back pain from osteoporosis, and discuss her social problems of having a drug addicted son stealing her social security check (and sending her to social service to get some monetary assistance) I probably will only bill for Diabetes, and if I bill for the actual time I spent with her, I probably will have Medicare call it overbilling. Duh.
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