The average 56-year-old couple pays about $140,000 into the Medicare system over a lifetime and receives about $430,000 in benefits back. The program is also completely unaffordable. Medicare has unfinanced liabilities of more than $30 trillion.
Where Wisdom Lives - NYTimes.com
This is such a great article….more nuggets:
Some Democrats simply want to do nothing as Medicare careens toward bankruptcy. Last Sunday on “Face the Nation,” for example, Nancy Pelosi said, “I could never support any arrangement that reduced benefits for Medicare.”
Democrats generally seek to concentrate decision-making and cost-control power in the hands of centralized experts.
Republicans at their best are skeptical about top-down decision-making. They are skeptical that centralized experts can accurately predict costs. In 1967, the House Ways and Means Committee projected that Medicare would cost $12 billion by 1990. It actually cost $110 billion.
It’s sad that medicare is such a massive problem and yet politicians are not forthright about the size and scope of the problem.
Source: The New York Times
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