The words of Reagan

[BoogyMan]

Truth is truth, no matter how old.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRdLpem-AAs

[Cap'n Chew]

I know right? It was a terrible time after Medicare became law and the private healthcare industry was taken over by the federal government. Folks had to wait 30 years to get a flu shot, our taxes quintupled, but at least folks found work in the Grandma-killing factories in the FEMA camps.

That happened right?

[Mr. P]

I know right? It was a terrible time after Medicare became law and the private healthcare industry was taken over by the federal government. Folks had to wait 30 years to get a flu shot, our taxes quintupled, but at least folks found work in the Grandma-killing factories in the FEMA camps.

That happened right?

Pay attention..Medicare is broke and the Administration has admitted just this week, death panels will exist. No they don't call them death panels but that's what it amounts to.

[BoogyMan]

I know right? It was a terrible time after Medicare became law and the private healthcare industry was taken over by the federal government. Folks had to wait 30 years to get a flu shot, our taxes quintupled, but at least folks found work in the Grandma-killing factories in the FEMA camps.

That happened right?

When one has to resort to logical fallacy right out of the gate it is obvious he has hitched his wagon to a lame horse. (http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/straw-man.html)

Egads man, disconnect from the collective and have a thought of your own. :lol:

[Cap'n Chew]

Pay attention..Medicare is broke and the Administration has admitted just this week, death panels will exist. No they don't call them death panels but that's what it amounts to.

No, they didn't claim anything of the sort.

Medicare isn't broke either, at least yet.

[Cap'n Chew]

When one has to resort to logical fallacy right out of the gate it is obvious he has hitched his wagon to a lame horse. (http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/straw-man.html)

Egads man, disconnect from the collective and have a thought of your own. :lol:

Looking at the meltdown from all the right-wing doomsayers out there, it seems that your side needs to get its collective head out of the ass of groupthink.

I love it when folks don't take their own advice to heart lol.

[Gadget (fmr Marine)]

Looking at the meltdown from all the right-wing doomsayers out there, it seems that your side needs to get its collective head out of the ass of groupthink.

I love it when folks don't take their own advice to heart lol.

I'm your huckleberry......

Maybe a quick gander at the CBO's report will paint another picture....if it ain't broke, why all the attention and funds pouring in to it...instead of reducing payments why does Obama want to freeze the levels at 2009 levels through 2020...at a cost of just under $300 BILLION?

Why do you resort to insults...have you run out of educated retorts or facts?

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/112xx/doc11280/03-24-apb.pdf

[BoogyMan]

Looking at the meltdown from all the right-wing doomsayers out there, it seems that your side needs to get its collective head out of the ass of groupthink.

I love it when folks don't take their own advice to heart lol.

Meltdown? What an idiotic remark. When you collectivist beggars get your hands out of our pockets, the rhetorical barbs are likely to stop. Who cares about the constitution and foundations of our nation, right? Just as long as some left wing nutjob gets a free ride?

[Kathianne]

No, they didn't claim anything of the sort.

Medicare isn't broke either, at least yet.

Really? May not have the problems of SSI, yet, but there are so many lessons to be observed from both, yet you and others choose to ignore them. Interesting article from 1993:

http://reason.com/archives/1993/01/01/the-medicare-monster


The Medicare Monster

A Cautionary Tale

Steven Hayward & Erik Peterson from the January 1993 issue

The scene is Capitol Hill. It’s the year 2035. Thousands of elderly protesters assemble outside the Capitol building. Inside, the House Ways and Means Committee meets to enact huge cuts in both Medicare and the national health-insurance program. Members are reluctant to take this step, but there’s no choice. Although Congress raised the Medicare payroll-tax rate to 15 percent a decade ago, the Medicare program is still woefully insolvent, consuming 40 percent of the $10-trillion federal budget. Because the total burden of payroll taxes for all social programs has reached 45 percent, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that half of the U.S. economy has gone "underground," like Latin American economies in the 1980s. Another hike in payroll taxes would only drive more of the economy underground. But elderly voters, who now make up a majority of the electorate, have swarmed to Washington demanding "fairness," since they have paid into the system for so many years.

Sound farfetched? The numbers suggest that this scenario could actually come to pass as soon as the next decade, not way off in 2035. The Medicare program is heading for a smashup, yet our political leaders speak only of instituting new federal health-insurance programs that would cover everyone...

The cost of Medicare is a good place to begin. At its start, in 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that Medicare would cost only about $ 12 billion by 1990 (a figure that included an allowance for inflation). This was a supposedly "conservative" estimate. But in 1990 Medicare actually cost $107 billion.

This is a mere bagatelle compared with "conservative" projections for the next generation. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Medicare will cost $223 billion by 1997. Constance Homer, deputy secretary of Health and Human Services, warns that "by the year 2003, at the current rates, we will be spending more on Medicare than we do on Social Security."

The news gets even worse for the "out years" after that. The Health Care Finance Administration has given up making long-range projections of budget outlays of Medicare. Instead, HCFA makes calculations about the "actuarial balance" of the program–how much of the nation’s payroll will be required to pay for the program.

The 1992 annual report of the Federal Hospital Insurance Trust Fund, which pays for the hospital-insurance portion of Medicare, warns that the Medicare program "is severely out of financial balance" and could go bust as soon as the year 2000. The report says expenditures from the hospital fund represented 1.3 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product in 1991 and will grow to 4.7 percent by 2065. To cover the cost, the Medicare payroll-tax rate will have to more than quadruple, from the current rate of 2.9 percent to 13.79 percent.

The full narrative of Medicare’s enactment in 1965, a classic tale of legislative and interest-group infighting, is too long to recount in detail here. Proposals for Medicare-style programs began surfacing in Congress during World War 11 but didn’t have a serious prospect of passage until the Kennedy administration.

Repeatedly in the early 1960s a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats defeated Medicare. The key figure in this perennial drama was Wilbur Mills, the legendary chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Mills refused to pass a Medicare bill out of that key committee, supposedly out of concern that Medicare would threaten the integrity of the Social Security program (to which Medicare is attached).

Following the Democratic landslide in the election of 1964, which gave Democrats a 2-to-1 majority in both houses of Congress, President Lyndon Johnson exerted his influence to stack the Ways and Means Committee with new Democrats sympathetic to Medicare. Wilbur Mills changed his mind and embraced Medicare. "Mills can count" was the explanation given for his flip-flop. This new political landscape virtually assured that Medicare would sail through Congress with huge majorities.

When it became apparent after the 1964 election that Medicare’s passage was likely to be a slam dunk, the American Medical Association and Republicans scurried to put forward an alternative. The AMA foolishly tried to exploit public confusion over the fact that the Medicare proposal covered only hospital expenses but not costs for doctors, surgeons, dentists, and other outpatient services.

Arguing now that Medicare didn’t go far enough, the AMA sought to outflank Medicare with an alternative program that would include outpatient services as well as hospital expenses. "Eldercare," as it was called, provided for a voluntary comprehensive insurance program, administered through the states and financed through means-tested premiums from recipients and federal matching funds. Not to be outdone by the AMA, House Republicans, under new leader Gerald Ford, offered their own alternative, which was similar to Eldercare except that it would be administered by the federal government....

[Mr. P]

No, they didn't claim anything of the sort.

Medicare isn't broke either, at least yet.

I heard them..if I come across the clips I'll post em.