Tag Archives: Medicare

Videos

Peter Robinson interviews Paul Ryan on fixing Washington

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Here’s a 47-minute interview with the Republican candidate for Vice President.

Topics:

  • health care reform
  • patient-centered health care
  • patient choice
  • price and quality competition
  • reducing costs
  • empowering states
  • education reform
  • separate health care from the employer and attach it to the worker
  • the root cause of rising health costs
  • the moral hazard caused by government spending “makers vs. takers”
  • fixing dependency on the government by changing incentives
  • how Republicans can get votes from Democrats and Independents
  • how far is America from becoming Greece?
  • is the debt crisis avoidable?
  • the importance of the 2012 election
  • reforming Social Security

Best quote: “we need to kick this thing upstairs to the American people” (on letting the people decide instead of government).

H/T Rocking With Hawking.

Commentary

Entitlements programs are going bankrupt: how can we fix them?

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From the American Enterprise Institute, a post that explains in brief how to reform each of the three largest entitlement programs so that they will not go bankrupt by the time today’s younger workers need them.

Here are the programs:

  1. Social Security (a social program to redistribute wealth from current workers to current retirees)
  2. Medicaid (a social program to provide health care to low income/low wealth Americans)
  3. Medicare (a social program to provide health care and prescription drugs to older Americans)

And here’s one of the solutions (for Social Security):

Social Security is the easiest entitlement program to reform and can be done without raising taxes.

  • The age should be gradually raised to 70 by 2065.
  • Benefits should be indexed to price inflation, not wage inflation, as the program’s purpose is to keep the elderly out of poverty.
  • Benefits should gradually be reduced for earners with high incomes. The system should be a way to keep individuals out of poverty, not create a dependent upper- and middle-class.

Together these three reforms would ensure Social Security stays solvent. The entire system, however, could be easily replaced with a new program designed to keep seniors out of poverty and empower them throughout their retirement. People should be given the incentive to work longer by eliminating the Social Security payroll tax for individuals over 62, and a basic income supplement should be provided to impoverished senior citizens. Workers should then be given ownership of their retirement savings by enrolling all workers 55 and younger into a retirement savings account funded by 5 percent of the worker’s earnings (2.5 percent from the individual and 2.5 percent from the employer). These simple reforms would create a system that  actually provides a safety net for needy citizens — all for 60 percent of what the U.S. currently spends on Social Security.

Click through for the other two problems and solutions.

News

Half of all Americans live in households that get government handouts

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From the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

49.1%: Percent of the population that lives in a household where at least one member received some type of government benefit in the first quarter of 2011.

Cutting government spending is no easy task, and it’s made more complicated by recent Census Bureau data showing that nearly half of the people in the U.S. live in a household that receives at least one government benefit, and many likely received more than one.

The 49.1% of the population in a household that gets benefits is up from 30% in the early 1980s and 44.4% as recently as the third quarter of 2008.

[…] As of early 2011, 15% of people lived in a household that received food stamps, 26% had someone enrolled in Medicaid and 2% had a member receiving unemployment benefits. Families doubling up to save money or pool expenses also is likely leading to more multigenerational households. But even without the effects of the recession, there would be a larger reliance on government.

The Census data show that 16% of the population lives in a household where at least one member receives Social Security and 15% receive or live with someone who gets Medicare. There is likely a lot of overlap, since Social Security and Medicare tend to go hand in hand, but those percentages also are likely to increase as the Baby Boom generation ages.

[…]The more people who receive benefits, the harder it’s going to be to make cuts, and it’s never popular to raise taxes. In some respects that argues for letting a combination of tax increases and spending cuts that is set to automatically hit in 2013 take effect. There’s just one problem: the Congressional Budget Office says it would sink the economy into recession.

All of this dependence on the government is not good for us. How can we compete with the rest of the world when we just sitting around borrowing money from our kids and spending it?