Medicine
.
The fact is that the wealthiest are doing great and everyone else is being penalized. This cannot be justified by any reasonable economics, voodoo, trickle-down, Friedmanesque or anything else. The elite have a Congress that they have bought and paid for, as discussed in his November 28, 2010 column, Still the Best Congress Money Can Buy, by the NY Times’ Frank Rich. He refers us to recent Times articles documenting the recent enormous corporate profits (“Corporate Profits were the highest on record last quarter” by Catherine Rampell, November 23, 2010) and profligate spending by the Wall St. “masters of the universe”[1] (With a Swagger, Wallets Out, Wall Street Dares to Celebrate, November 23, 2010, by Suzanne Craig and Kevin Roose), while the Times’ editorial page reminds us that while they grow wealthier regular people, who still can’t get jobs, also can’t even get their unemployment benefits extended (The Unemployed Held Hostage, Again, November 28, 2010).
Our health system has long been terrible, in lack of equitable access for many while there have been enormous profits for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, in excessive interventions and procedures for the well-insured masquerading as the “best health care system in the world”, quantity masquerading as quality even for those who have had health coverage. As developing countries such as India seek to develop their own health systems, the US is notable as a model for what should not be done (see the interview with Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in the Times of India 'The US model of private health insurers is inefficient, expensive' (thanks to Don McCanne in his wonderful Quote of the Day). The ACA was a first step to fixing it, but scarcely a final one. It is time to stop talking about how to inflict more economic pain on the bulk of Americans, unemployed and working, until we stop giving the store away to the elite.
Surowiecki notes that “seniors think of Medicare as an “entitlement”—something that they have a right to because they paid for it”. Why not? Even though he notes that today they “get far more out of Medicare than they ever put in,” he adds, appropriately, that “There’s nothing wrong with this: the U.S. is rich enough so that the elderly shouldn’t have to worry about having health insurance; before Medicare, roughly half of them didn’t have it”. He’s right on that. And we all should have it – Medicare for all, coverage for all of us. After 45 years of it working for seniors, it is time for it to be an entitlement for everyone. Something, finally, for the 99% who are not the “masters of the universe”. Sounds good to me.
[1] A phrase coined by Tom Wolfe to refer to Wall St titans in his 1987 book The Bonfire of the Vanities, Farrar Straus and Giroux.
.
- Medicare: A Lifeline, Not A Ponzi Scheme
.In an earlier post (Medicare: We need to expand it, not cut it!, July 1, 2011), I commented on the proposals from politicians such as Wisconsin representative Paul Ryan and Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman to limit Medicare. I quoted economists...
- Medicare: We Need To Expand It, Not Cut It!
. Medicare is big news lately. Saving Medicare, cutting Medicare, reforming Medicare. Medicare has become a part of the political right’s effort to roll back all programs that were implemented in the 20th century to help provide any safety net for Americans....
- Solving Medicare Costs And The Budget Deficit: Primary Care, Cost-effectiveness, And Universal Health Coverage
. According to the New York Times, “Here is a basic truth about the deficit: In the long run, it cannot be fixed, without reining in spending on Medicare and Medicaid.” In a December 11, 2010 editorial titled “Health Care and the Deficit”, the...
- Seniors And Medicare: Beware Not Simply "scare Mongers" But Lying Hypocrites
. Old age, at whatever chronologic age it happens to one, is not an easy time. The body loses its resilience, often strength, and resistance to disease. Seniors account for the bulk of medical spending because chronic disease is so much more common. It...
- Lockboxes, Medicare Reform, And The Myth Of "free Stuff"
Recently, I had an interesting conversation with my dad about the current policy debates involving the Medicare program. Since he, along with my mother, is one of the two most important Medicare beneficiaries in my life, hearing his perspective was immensely...
Medicine
Tax Breaks for the "Masters of the Universe" or for the rest of us?
.
In an Associated Press story from November 28, 2010, “Tax break for employer health plans a target again” (it was widely picked up; here I’ve given the link to the Pensacola News-Journal), Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar writes about the resurgence of interest in eliminating the employer tax break for contributions to employee health plans. This proposal, put forward from time to time, has been given new prominence by the recommendations of Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the. not dumb and dumber but right-and-righter co-chairs of the President’s task force on deficit reduction, which they have morphed into a task force on cutting taxes. For Bowles and Simpson, it is one of only a number of proposals they make that would take away middle-class tax benefits, and not even the least popular: that honor would almost certainly go to the elimination of the mortgage interest deduction.
The employer’s ability to deduct contributions to their employees’ health insurance goes back to the post-World War II era, when there was tremendous competition for workers (imagine that!) and wage and price controls made it impossible for businesses to compete on the basis of pay, so fringe benefits – specifically health insurance – became a real perk. The unions liked it because they could bargain for this benefit for their members. The losers, of course, were all of us, who did not get a national health insurance program. And for many years this benefit has been a real advantage to being employed by a company with a collective bargaining agreement, and clearly unions will strongly oppose any effort to make it more difficult for them to achieve this benefit.
Meanwhile, some Medicare recipients, concerned about maintaining one of the few benefits the elderly still have, have come out against much of the health reform bill. Many of the most vocal opponents are the wealthy elderly, but unfortunately many middle- and working-class seniors are in this group. This is the subject of James Surowiecki’s piece “Greedy Geezers?” in the New Yorker, Nov 22, 2010, as noted by Tallgrass Activist David Kingsley. While the title might be offensive, many of his points are well taken: “There’s a colossal irony here: the very people who currently enjoy the benefits of a subsidized, government-run insurance system are intent on keeping others from getting the same treatment.” One example of what seniors can see as real cutbacks to their benefits are the cuts to the Medicare Advantage program. Medicare Advantage (also known as Medicare Part “C”) is a program that basically takes your Medicare payment, and an additional payment from you, and enrolls you in an HMO that provides you benefits beyond that which traditional Medicare offers (such as glasses, hearing aids, a better drug benefit, especially before Part “D” was enacted). It was created by the Reagan administration as a way to, at least in part, privatize Medicare, and was accompanied by higher payments from the federal government to these insurers than was spent on traditional Medicare beneficiaries. This was a corrupt program that ACA was right to eliminate, but because those seniors enrolled in it were getting a benefit, they receive a cut. Of course, the cut (appropriately) is much greater to the insurance company, which was getting most of the benefit (the extra benefits received by the enrollees were worth much less than the insurance companies were being paid).
What a great example of divide and conquer! Bowles-and-Simpson’s (now they are one, ostensible bipartisanship aside) proposals, while they were supposed to be about deficit reduction, are all about decreasing taxes. And especially decreasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations, a strategy that has been demonstrated by the last decade to be extraordinarily beneficial to – the wealthiest Americans and corporations. Trickle down economics, decried by George HW Bush as “voodoo economics” during the 1980 election, are no less so now, although to call them that insults voodoo. Interviewed on NPR’s “All Things Considered”, Bowles-and-Simpson are asked about the criticism of their proposals by economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman, who says it is about redistributing wealth upward. While Simpson says Krugman has “lost his marbles”, he doesn’t address Krugman’s criticisms.
The employer’s ability to deduct contributions to their employees’ health insurance goes back to the post-World War II era, when there was tremendous competition for workers (imagine that!) and wage and price controls made it impossible for businesses to compete on the basis of pay, so fringe benefits – specifically health insurance – became a real perk. The unions liked it because they could bargain for this benefit for their members. The losers, of course, were all of us, who did not get a national health insurance program. And for many years this benefit has been a real advantage to being employed by a company with a collective bargaining agreement, and clearly unions will strongly oppose any effort to make it more difficult for them to achieve this benefit.
Meanwhile, some Medicare recipients, concerned about maintaining one of the few benefits the elderly still have, have come out against much of the health reform bill. Many of the most vocal opponents are the wealthy elderly, but unfortunately many middle- and working-class seniors are in this group. This is the subject of James Surowiecki’s piece “Greedy Geezers?” in the New Yorker, Nov 22, 2010, as noted by Tallgrass Activist David Kingsley. While the title might be offensive, many of his points are well taken: “There’s a colossal irony here: the very people who currently enjoy the benefits of a subsidized, government-run insurance system are intent on keeping others from getting the same treatment.” One example of what seniors can see as real cutbacks to their benefits are the cuts to the Medicare Advantage program. Medicare Advantage (also known as Medicare Part “C”) is a program that basically takes your Medicare payment, and an additional payment from you, and enrolls you in an HMO that provides you benefits beyond that which traditional Medicare offers (such as glasses, hearing aids, a better drug benefit, especially before Part “D” was enacted). It was created by the Reagan administration as a way to, at least in part, privatize Medicare, and was accompanied by higher payments from the federal government to these insurers than was spent on traditional Medicare beneficiaries. This was a corrupt program that ACA was right to eliminate, but because those seniors enrolled in it were getting a benefit, they receive a cut. Of course, the cut (appropriately) is much greater to the insurance company, which was getting most of the benefit (the extra benefits received by the enrollees were worth much less than the insurance companies were being paid).
What a great example of divide and conquer! Bowles-and-Simpson’s (now they are one, ostensible bipartisanship aside) proposals, while they were supposed to be about deficit reduction, are all about decreasing taxes. And especially decreasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations, a strategy that has been demonstrated by the last decade to be extraordinarily beneficial to – the wealthiest Americans and corporations. Trickle down economics, decried by George HW Bush as “voodoo economics” during the 1980 election, are no less so now, although to call them that insults voodoo. Interviewed on NPR’s “All Things Considered”, Bowles-and-Simpson are asked about the criticism of their proposals by economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman, who says it is about redistributing wealth upward. While Simpson says Krugman has “lost his marbles”, he doesn’t address Krugman’s criticisms.
The fact is that the wealthiest are doing great and everyone else is being penalized. This cannot be justified by any reasonable economics, voodoo, trickle-down, Friedmanesque or anything else. The elite have a Congress that they have bought and paid for, as discussed in his November 28, 2010 column, Still the Best Congress Money Can Buy, by the NY Times’ Frank Rich. He refers us to recent Times articles documenting the recent enormous corporate profits (“Corporate Profits were the highest on record last quarter” by Catherine Rampell, November 23, 2010) and profligate spending by the Wall St. “masters of the universe”[1] (With a Swagger, Wallets Out, Wall Street Dares to Celebrate, November 23, 2010, by Suzanne Craig and Kevin Roose), while the Times’ editorial page reminds us that while they grow wealthier regular people, who still can’t get jobs, also can’t even get their unemployment benefits extended (The Unemployed Held Hostage, Again, November 28, 2010).
Our health system has long been terrible, in lack of equitable access for many while there have been enormous profits for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, in excessive interventions and procedures for the well-insured masquerading as the “best health care system in the world”, quantity masquerading as quality even for those who have had health coverage. As developing countries such as India seek to develop their own health systems, the US is notable as a model for what should not be done (see the interview with Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in the Times of India 'The US model of private health insurers is inefficient, expensive' (thanks to Don McCanne in his wonderful Quote of the Day). The ACA was a first step to fixing it, but scarcely a final one. It is time to stop talking about how to inflict more economic pain on the bulk of Americans, unemployed and working, until we stop giving the store away to the elite.
Surowiecki notes that “seniors think of Medicare as an “entitlement”—something that they have a right to because they paid for it”. Why not? Even though he notes that today they “get far more out of Medicare than they ever put in,” he adds, appropriately, that “There’s nothing wrong with this: the U.S. is rich enough so that the elderly shouldn’t have to worry about having health insurance; before Medicare, roughly half of them didn’t have it”. He’s right on that. And we all should have it – Medicare for all, coverage for all of us. After 45 years of it working for seniors, it is time for it to be an entitlement for everyone. Something, finally, for the 99% who are not the “masters of the universe”. Sounds good to me.
[1] A phrase coined by Tom Wolfe to refer to Wall St titans in his 1987 book The Bonfire of the Vanities, Farrar Straus and Giroux.
.
- Medicare: A Lifeline, Not A Ponzi Scheme
.In an earlier post (Medicare: We need to expand it, not cut it!, July 1, 2011), I commented on the proposals from politicians such as Wisconsin representative Paul Ryan and Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman to limit Medicare. I quoted economists...
- Medicare: We Need To Expand It, Not Cut It!
. Medicare is big news lately. Saving Medicare, cutting Medicare, reforming Medicare. Medicare has become a part of the political right’s effort to roll back all programs that were implemented in the 20th century to help provide any safety net for Americans....
- Solving Medicare Costs And The Budget Deficit: Primary Care, Cost-effectiveness, And Universal Health Coverage
. According to the New York Times, “Here is a basic truth about the deficit: In the long run, it cannot be fixed, without reining in spending on Medicare and Medicaid.” In a December 11, 2010 editorial titled “Health Care and the Deficit”, the...
- Seniors And Medicare: Beware Not Simply "scare Mongers" But Lying Hypocrites
. Old age, at whatever chronologic age it happens to one, is not an easy time. The body loses its resilience, often strength, and resistance to disease. Seniors account for the bulk of medical spending because chronic disease is so much more common. It...
- Lockboxes, Medicare Reform, And The Myth Of "free Stuff"
Recently, I had an interesting conversation with my dad about the current policy debates involving the Medicare program. Since he, along with my mother, is one of the two most important Medicare beneficiaries in my life, hearing his perspective was immensely...