No Trust and No Fund -- Medicare is Bankrupt
For those of us who follow closely the federal financing scam called the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) and Hospital Insurance (HI) Trust Funds, more commonly known as the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds, nothing here in Gary North’s new article on the subject is surprising. But North’s piece does remind me that most people continue to be unaware of the disgraceful deception the federal government has run on Social Security throughout the program’s entire lifetime. So it is important to disseminate North’s very informative essay.
The Trust-Fund shell game has been especially outrageous since the Greenspan Commission convinced Congress to raise payroll taxes in the mid 1980s, after which the government began blatantly lying about how the Trust Funds were using excess tax revenues to “build up” a reserve against falling payroll tax revenues when the Baby Boomers began to retire and the number of workers-to-beneficiaries ratio started to fall.
The big lie on Social Security and Medicare has always been a Big Bipartisan Lie. But now the level of official mendacity is being taken to new heights and taken on a distinctly partisan flavor as the Obama Administration proposes a cut-Medicare-first strategy to pay for ObamaCare. Although the healthcare system in America does have problems, it is not in extremis, far from it; 80 percent to 90 percent of the American public consistently report they are happy with the medical care they receive.
Contrary to the fright tactics and scare mongering coming out of the Obama White House, there is no urgency to completely overhaul the nation’s healthcare system. To the contrary, a few strategic and well-conceived reforms to the system would go a long way toward taking care of its major problems. There certainly is no need to turn the entire system upside down this year.
Medicare, however, is in extremis, and there is an urgent need to fix it. As North points out, the program went bankrupt last year. Instead of fixing Medicare for the long run, the Obama Administration wants to cut Medicare first to help pay for his grandiose scheme to have the government take over America’s healthcare system and turn it over to the bureaucrats to run.
Comments
Add a comment