Now that campaigning is finished, it is incumbent on our elected government to face up to Medicare’s problems and implement thoughtful solutions. Pretending that Medicare is financially solvent while ignoring the facts about the declining acceptance of Medicare and the future of health care access for seniors under the ACA is worse than misguided policy, it is outright dishonesty. Instead of fixating on ideological differences, the first step is to agree about the urgency of the situation, so that we can keep Medicare for the long term in a form consistent with America’s core.
Regardless of the outcome of the 2012 elections, the facts about Medicare have not changed.
Medicare is spiraling into bankruptcy, owing to both the demographics of America and the realities about health care. Every year for the next two decades, roughly 3 to 4 million seniors become newly eligible for Medicare as the baby boomer generation ages. Elected officials of both parties do not dispute the seriousness of the problem described in the 2012 Medicare Trustees Report, which estimated Medicare’s unfunded obligations to be almost $38 trillion and a hospital insurance trust fund that will become insolvent in 2024.
That outlook does not even consider the bigger picture over the next decades coming as a consequence of the fantastic advances in modern medicine. As the newest “Global Burden of Disease” report in the Lancet just acknowledged, with increasing longevity come two very expensive consequences: more people are surviving to die of chronic diseases found only in old age. They require expensive drugs, diagnostics, and hospital care; and more people are living with disorders that don’t kill them, but that produce disability and reduced health.
An increasing proportion of doctors are already not accepting Medicare patients, and the primary reason is low payment for services. A 2008 report by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, an independent federal panel, said that 29 percent of Medicare beneficiaries who were looking for a primary care doctor had a problem finding one. In the 2008 HSC national survey, more than 20 percent of primary care doctors accepted no new Medicare patients (only 4.5 percent accepted no new privately insured patients) and about 40 percent of primary care doctors and 20 percent of specialists refused most new Medicare patients. Today, in some states, more than half of doctors already do not accept new Medicare patients.
Read More at Forbes . By Scott W. Atlas.
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Sequestering And Washington’s Fiscal Incompetence
As many of you may know, if the political class does not get its act together by March 1, 2013, automatic Federal government spending cuts will kick in that will reduce government spending by over a trillion dollars over the next ten years. This “sequestering” of budget dollars was agreed to by Congress and Obama in August of 2011 in the debt ceiling negotiations.
While this is a decent first step in reining in government spending, it is still pretty meager. Overall government spending will still increase in the baseline budget view, it will just increase at a somewhat lower rate. Annual spending deficits will continue to mount up, increasing our national debt and burdening future generations of Americans with that debt.
How anemic is this effort at reducing spending? Let’s do some simple math:
Despite this feeble attempt at expense reduction, many in the administration are choking on it. Retired Defense Secretary Leon Panetta claims our national defense would be endangered by a 2.2% reduction in spending. Secretary of State John Kerry asserted that we could not afford a meager 2.2% reduction in his budget since we needed to continue to butt into the lives of people in other countries around the world. President Obama has been spreading panic, claiming many vital government services would be slashed because of this meager 2.2% cut in spending.
Makes you wonder if these so-called leaders are 1) that out of touch with the real world, 2) want to protect their turf at any cost regardless of the impact on the fiscal integrity of the country, or 3) are just that fiscally incompetent that they do not know how to run an efficient operation and can only operate it by increasing their budget rather than decreasing their organization’s waste, redundancy, and incompetence.
To help these politicians understand why this 2.2% reduction is a very easily attainable goal, let’s point out via just a HANDFUL of examples of how wasteful, redundant and incompetent their organizations are today:
- Medicare and Medicaid lose over $100 billion a year to waste, inefficiency, and criminal fraud.
- Social Security loses over $100 billion a year to waste, inefficiency, and criminal fraud.
- The IRS admits that it is so incompetent that it fails to collect over $380 billion a year from tax evaders.
- The U.S. Navy, one of Panetta’s former organizations, spent $300 million to build two Navy ships almost to completion before spending another $10 million to turn them both into scrap metal without ever using them.
- The State Department, John Kerry’s organization, recently spent $80 million to build a consulate building in northern Afghanistan that will never be used since the $80 million is not defensible from a terrorist attack and was built by bypassing the State Department’s own building guidelines relative to terrorists.
- The Transportation Safety Agency recently bought over $180 million worth of airport security equipment that it will never use, storing it in a warehouse in its original packaging.
- Employees in the General Services Administration threw themselves a Las Vegas bash at taxpayer expense, resulting in the dismissal and resignations of GSA employees and executives.
- The Obama administration recently made the inane, indefensible decision to give Egypt over one billion dollars worth of F-16 fighter planes and tanks, weapons that could eventually impact both Department of Defense and State Department operations in the future.
- And last but not least, consider some new findings relative to the President’s economic stimulus plan, as recently reported by the Independent Journal Review. Unfortunately, these types of expenses are no confined to the stimulus program, they happen every day in every Federal government department and entity.
These insults to the taxpayer occurred even though when President Obama signed the $831 billion stimulus into law in 2009, he stated that “tough choices smart investments” needed to be made. So ask yourself: if these are the “smart investments,” you can only wonder what the dumb expenses were:
Disgraceful wastes of money. Which gets us back to our central question: Are Kerry, Panetta, and Obama out of touch, protecting turf or just fiscally incompetent? Or possibly all of the above?