Social Security & Medicare Died in 1996
Printed: 25 March 2013
Yupper, and here’s why:
We’ll ignore all of the legal arguments of unconstitutionality, simply because, except for Ben Stein, they’re ignored by everyone except Ben and me. We’ll not bring out all of the points regarding how the money is collected and misspent, and we’ll even ignore that neither program is an insurance program but a tax on payrolls and then a redistribution to the under-taxed, a federally operated Ponzi Scheme.
In 1996 a research hospital in London U.K., grew a new bladder for a patient. It was successfully implanted and the patient is still doing well. On 23 March 2013, The Wall Street Journal had a page one leader reporting that this same hospital was building a heart from scratch. Over the past six months, both TWSJ and The Economist, in its quarterly science review, have reported that in Germany, a drug is being dispensed that halts ALS and Alzheimer’s, and that in Switzerland, a drug trial on mice has reversed Multiple Sclerosis (MS), which means that we’re probably within 5 years of having a cure for MS. With the organ growth technology, diabetes is beaten, as well as joint replacement. Sounds science-fictiony, doesn’t it? No more heart disease, no more organ failures, no more limb loss, no more neural deficits, hmm, almost a complete body exchange, isn’t it?
What it really means is that individuals will shortly be able to live a healthy, long, life with no loss of brain function, ie, no senility! Long as in over 500 years, finances permitting!
Currently Social Security, Medicare, and PPACA (Obamacare), are all transfer of wealth programs. The young are taxed to pay for medical services and pension payments to the elderly, elderly being statutorily defined for Health Care as either 65 y/o or “in need”, which includes financial as well as medical “need”, and as either 62, 65 or 67, depending upon when you were born, a date determined by Congress’s arbitrary and politically expeditious whim, and 72, or more, now being discussed in committee.
Although a reading of Obamacare shows that those under the age of two and over that of 57 will be ineligible for these replacement procedures because as of today, and those included have specific restrictions and caveats as to availability of experimental procedures +/or drugs, while the regulations are being written, these procedures are experimental and therefore expressly excluded from Medicare and PPACA, an immediate concierge medical service will make them available to all who can pay either through private insurance or personal wealth, and thereby they will become common and accepted, thus these procedures will cease to be experimental within 15 years. The rationale for Obamacare, “adequate healthcare for all”, will force the politicians to make these procedures available to all, regardless of their cost and regardless of the recipient’s ability to pay.
What age retirement now? At what age will the politicians, who have excluded themselves from Obamacare, yet require that the taxpayer pay for their healthcare, thereby automatically making them eligible for organ implants and neural security, put your retirement eligibility for Social Security Insurance, Medicare, +/or Obamacare? 100? 150? 200? And where will you work for those years? Where will you live? What jobs will become available to the young? Those whom you expect to support you and pay for these implants? Suppose technology makes you un-employed at age 172 and yet you are expected to live to 500? This is a very strong possibility with these new medical advances.
The 70 year old Japanese Minister of Finance has already stated publicly that the elderly, of which he is not one, should start dying to make way for the young in Japan.
Do you really think that when less than 1% of the population is under the age of 72, and that they are the only productive segment of society, no matter how productive they are, they will be able to support the other 99+%? Even if the wanted to support the other 99%, do you really think that it’s even possible?
So, what now for all of these welfare programs?
Oh, and just a reminder, even if the politicians themselves do not read the papers, they do have staff who read them and the politicians do get those reports. The politicians are better informed on this than you are, so y’all need to start thinking on why these issues weren’t being addressed when Bill & Hillary were at 1600 and good ole Newt was speaking in the house?
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Obamacare Chickens Come Home to Roost and Ruin, by Sam Adolphsen
Obamacare Chickens Come Home To Roost And Ruin
Posted on Tuesday, February 27, 2024
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by AMAC Newsline
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51 Comments
AMAC Exclusive – By Sam Adolphsen
When you hear or read about Medicaid, one of the largest welfare programs in the U.S., the connection to Ernest Hemingway might not be immediately evident.
However, a piece of wisdom from Hemingway’s character Jake in The Sun Also Rises applies to the challenges facing Medicaid today: “Getting something for nothing only delayed the presentation of the bill. The bill always came.”
Nowhere is that sentiment truer than in the Medicaid program. And the bill is coming due in states around the country. Taxpayers and the truly needy had better look out, because the bill must be paid.
Medicaid (not to be confused with Medicare) is a program that was meant for the truly needy, the elderly, the disabled, and poor children. That was before Obama expanded the program to tens of millions of able-bodied adults, including adults with no kids at home, as one of the most controversial parts of Obamacare.
Just twenty years ago, there were only 7 million non-disabled, working age adults on Medicaid. Today, after a decade of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, which was partly funded by hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to Medicare, there are nearly 40 million able-bodied adults on the program.
That means almost half of the people on Medicaid, a program meant for the truly needy, are able-bodied adults who can and should be working. But most of them are not working. State data shows that more than half of those tens of millions of able-bodied adults don’t work at all.
This unrestrained growth in Medicaid, especially among able-bodied adults, is having a major detrimental effect on state budgets. In recent years, the COVID-era deficit spending from Washington D.C. included extra Medicaid funding for states and papered over the budget problems.
Now with that extra federal money going away, the bill has come due for many states. More will soon follow.
California is facing a record budget shortfall of $68 billion after further expanding Medicaid to cover illegal immigrants and raising the income limit well into the middle-class.
New York is facing a $7 billion shortfall this year, much of which can be attributed to an increase of $10 billion in Medicaid costs in just one year. It doesn’t help that New York is also giving Medicaid to illegal immigrants and proposing a new scheme to keep people “continuously covered” for years with no eligibility checks.
So how will New York handle the bill coming due? Predictably, and sadly, by proposing cuts to care for the elderly and truly needy. The governor has already proposed a budget that cut tens of millions that was going to struggling nursing homes.
Where is the discussion of reining in the runaway costs and enrollment of millions of able-bodied adults? Nowhere to be found in New York.
Indiana, which foolishly expanded Medicaid to able-bodied adults years ago despite being a solidly red state, now faces more than a billion-dollar shortfall in Medicaid—just as many conservative opponents of the policy predicted at the time. The Indiana Family and Social Services Administration initially proposed cutting back a service that helps provide in-home care for elderly and disabled individuals. Meanwhile, almost half of Indiana’s two million people on Medicaid are able-bodied adults.
Arizona, another Medicaid expansion state, is facing a huge budget shortfall that could total in the billions of dollars. While the Democrat governor is trying to blame the shortfall on tax cuts and school choice, the reality is that Medicaid expansion is driving the problem. Arizona had just 500,000 people on Medicaid in 2000. After expanding Medicaid, they now have 2.3 million on the program. Nearly a million of those are able-bodied adults.
These are just a few of the states grappling with the Medicaid expansion budget problem. Colorado can’t cut property taxes like they want to because of Medicaid overruns. Maine is proposing to spend millions to hire new state workers to process Medicaid applications after expanding.
The Biden administration is making this problem worse. The Biden Medicaid office, run by the former Attorney General of California, has done everything in its power to keep states from limiting the growth of able-bodied adults on their welfare programs.
The Biden administration has even threatened states that have tried to clean the rolls up after COVID and demanded the adoption of policies that open the door to even more enrollment. This includes, no surprise, pushing states to adopt Medicaid expansion to even more able-bodied adults.
Unless states get the growth in able-bodied adults on their programs under control, there will be proposed cuts to the elderly and truly needy. There will be blown opportunities to cut property taxes. There will be cuts to road repairs and public safety. Or worse.
States that have avoided this Medicaid meltdown like Kansas, Texas, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi, should stand strong against Medicaid expansion to protect the truly needy who depend on the program, and the taxpayers that fund it.
The bill will always come due. The only question is, who will pay?
Sam Adolphsen is the policy director at the Foundation for Government Accountability, and the former Chief Operating Officer for the Maine Department of Health and Human Services where he oversaw welfare eligibility and fraud investigations.