@mule_eer ...and on Medicare
Trump agenda: Privatization of Social security and Medicare
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/201...tization-of-medicare-and-social-security.html
excerpt: (from analysis discussed on the issue)
"It’s a way to make the federal government’s balance sheet look better, because both of these are expensive programs. They’re expensive not because they’re inefficient. They’re extremely efficient. They’re expensive because healthcare costs, private as well as public, are rising astronomically high, and we need to control healthcare costs in the private sector as well as in the public sector.
We shouldn’t be shifting costs and what the block rated Medicaid and turning Medicare into Obamacare does, is it shifts costs from the federal government, in the case of Medicaid, to the states, and in the case of Medicare, to seniors and people with disabilities".
...more
"What this privatizing means is, instead of setting the money aside and putting it in a trust fund in the government and having these guaranteed benefits, it would be invested in the stock market and you’d have the ups and downs of the stock market, all the risks, and if you run out of money, that’s your problem. You’re on your own. That’s Social Security.
Medicare right now, you sign up, you’ve got your card, you’ve earned it your whole working life. You go to a hospital, you go to your doctor, you present the card, and the costs are paid for. What this would do is the federal government would say, “Here’s some money, go out on the market and go talk to all these various insurance companies and figure out what you want.” Now, before Medicare was enacted, that’s what we had, except without the government subsidy.
