It can't help being noticed how many times Romney mentions that Obama is cutting MediCare by $716 billion and how he repeatedly makes it clear that any current or near retiree will not be affected by his own plan – a sign that he will be relying on the vote of the older population and does not want to scare them. Obama's cut to MediCare is being used to support ObamaCare. Obama wants to address the issue in more detail but is told to hold off until later.
2012 Presidential Debate #1
NBC News
Oct 3, 2012
Mitt Romney and Barack Obama Debate MediCare, Vouchers, Private Health Insurance
The Medicare system collapsing isn’t exactly a bad thing. If you can’t compete we don’t need you; you close your doors it’s simple. And it saves us all money. The voucher system is a great idea
Actually, it is written into the law that Medicare cannot collapse. If the surplus were to drop below a certain level, the payment rate would have to be be reduced, but the system has built in protections against collapse.
Vouchers are great for the young and for the rich. If you are young, you are not likely to run out of money on your voucher. And if you are rich it doesn’t matter.
But our grandparents see something different. People have greater health care costs as they get older. A hospital stay for an “easy” heart transplant might cost upwards of half a million dollars.
What happens when your grandmother gets sick after she runs out of money on her voucher? If she is rich, no problem.
But if she’s not rich, and her voucher has been depleted, the only medical care she will be able to afford to choose will be an overdose of morphine to end her life painlessly.
But in a country with a voucher system, that is controlled by “Right-to-life” candidates such as Mike Pence, even self-administered euthanasia will be illegal again, and her only remaining option will be a slow and painful death.
I greatly underestimated the cost of a hospital stay for a heart transplant. The cost has gone way up since my grandmother’s surgery. I just googled for heart transplant costs. While I didn’t find 2016 costs, as of 2011 the average cost exceeded a million dollars, inclusive of doctor’s fees, hospital room and board, nursing services, medicine, etc…
Of course that’s here in the U.S. Without the overheads of pharmaceutical profit margins and the salaries of the millions of adjusters at so many insurance companies, working hard to disqualify as many benefit disbursements as possible, it would be much less.
(of course there are also insurance salespeople and other insurance co. staff, but so much work is duplicated – each company creates it’s own rate schedules, has it’s own formularies, hires competition and other kinds of analysts, etc)
Unfortunately, the more slices there are in a pie, the greater the pie costs.
(unless you bake it yourself, or at least buy the whole pie, instead of many slices)