It is more income redistribution. They want to loot the federal treasury for funds to reward those who support their political campaigns. Those companies will make out, literally like bandits, while the public will get a royal screwing.
Why serve the public when you can serve yourself and your sponsors?
Please tell me why any of us should vote to demolish programs that have provided economic stability for generations just so insurance companies can make even more money at our expense.
Because we should have never been in that business to begin with and how can we spend ourselfs' off a cliff?
Did you know?
44.1 million: Number of seniors and disabled citizens covered by Medicare
$432 billion: Amount spent in 2007 on Medicare
2019: The current estimate of the year that Medicare is expected to run out of funds
51: The percent of all federal income taxes Medicare will consume by 2042
So what happens when the entire government crashes, since "oh my" we can't stop helping people with other people money? We need to fix things and must happen NOW even if it is painful change.
Loot the federal treasury? There's nothing left to loot. It's all running on borrowed money. Getting government out of the healthcare business is one of the best things we could do for this country. Instead of prices skyrocketing to take advantage of govt money, medical services should be governed by supply and demand.
It's the same thing everytime govt tries to get into the supply chain, it screws up prices and only makes things worse. Ethanol...corn prices...food prices...any of this ring a bell?
I bet we have a ton of eldery on fixed incomes who are going to disagree with you..
Its great to say, but not so good in practice. At the end of the day the only people who support this kinda thing the people who can afford it all and it not really an issue to them. Sadly those are not the majority of people in America. You see, its actions like this that show the "tea party" not the everyday, factory working American.
I don't totally disagree with you. I thinks cuts have to be made, not just in Medicare, but across the board. Military budgets and ridiculous wars need to go first. Get the feds out of education and let the states take over the schools.
And when we start to show some real progress on cuts, move on to some tax hikes that go to paying down debt rather than taken in to be wasted. This waste is the problem most tea partiers have with taxes and tax hikes.
I dont think so, most tea partiers i saw had 1 issue.. Dont tax the rich!
Really though doing things like cutting medicare, funding for programs for the poor, education, union busting, etc etc... Pretty fail...
All this has turned into another political strong arm game for the right, at our expense. The tea party? Grassroots? You really think everyday Americans are going to say "cut funding for anything that might help us but dont tax the rich!" Meh, tea party is about as grassroots as George Bush.
I guess it depends on your definition of "what helps us". I don't think handouts help. I think that job creation is what helps. If you want to tax the hell out of the people that create jobs, don't expect job creation. You can't tax your way to prosperity.
You have officially left the real world behind and moved into the world of political philosophy (spin).
If you somehow got the impression that Medicare is a "handout" take a look at your paycheck. We pay for that program in our taxes, taxes which are used for the benefit of average Americans.
At what point in the world of spin did that become abhorrent?
We pay taxes for a program that promotes health and human dignity for the elderly and the impaired. And what does the GOP intend to replace that with? The proposal I have seen cuts Medicare and other programs that benefit the millions and, rather than paying down the debt, the highest priority goes to more benefits for the top 1% of earners. In other words, the GOP is asking average Americans to sacrifice for the benefit of the already rich. I understand how and why this is happening, but what I don't understand is how this can be spun into keeping us from falling off the cliff, or job creation, or some other beneficial-sounding purpose.
It is a naked grab for the nation's resources, pure and simple. Medicare, and other programs like it will be cannibalized for the benefit of the very few.
The real world is so screwed up it should be left behind. We do not pay for medicare. We pay into it, but the program cannot be covered by what it takes in. The mere fact that the government is IN the healthcare business causes many problems for the industry itself. If govt went into the car insurance business, only the rich could afford to insure their cars and get them fixed once fraud and governemnt waste got rolling.
Social security is the same. The amount of money we pay into social security could easily make the average person a millionaire if taken and invested properly over a lifetime. But the govt takes the money and spends it with no consideration given to investment. This is a very poor use of our tax dollars and should be an embarrassment to our politicians, but they aren't easily embarrassed.
MacThulhu
So they want to turn over Medicare, a program with a roughly 3% overhead, to corporations that want a 25-50% profit margin. Pray tell, where will that profit come from?