I'm going all Medicare all the time until further notice. (There's nothing happening in Massachusetts anyways. The legislature passed its health-care price controls, screwed a few percent of the population, and headed off to their second or third homes in the Berkshires or on the Cape for the rest of the Northern Hemisphere summer.)
Look to the list of the blog posts to the left to see what's new. The Obama Parade of Medicare Lies is never ending. (What would you expect of a guy who lied about his dying mother to get elected?)
And the Republicans have no response because they apparently want to keep the waters muddied. The result is total purposeful confusion for senior citizens like me.
So I'm going back to basics.
Over the next few weeks, I'll intersperse
- (a.) the answers to some simple Medicare questions with information that people under 55 don't know about Medicare together with
- (b.) some interesting statistical stuff from the June 2012 Medicare Data Book mixed with
- (c.) my attempts to correct the lies from Obama, and Bloomberg, and Brookings Institute, and CNN, and Columbia, and Harvard, and The National Review, and the New York Times (for example, here and here), and the Providence Journal, and USA Today, and WebMD... and wherever (even lies from Romney and Ryan if I see any).
When I'm finished -- and if you bother to string them together -- you'll understand Medicare, not the Democrat's or Republican's version of Medicare. I'll answer these basic questions with the details you'll need to hold your own at any September/October 2012 cocktail party:
- What healthcare services does Traditional Medicare cover?
- Very few. Details to follow but read Medicare and You if you cannot wait. (This is the 2012 version; 2013 version due in September 2012.)
- How much does Traditional Medicare cost?
- $800 a month in 2012. (Seniors pay $100 of it now, they paid for $400 of it through Medicare payroll tax dedctions for 40 years, and they get the remaining $300 in premium support. But Obama wants you to think premium support is a dangerous new idea.)
- How many seniors depend on Traditional Medicare?
- Everyone and almost no one. (Details to follow but see this recent stat from the June 2012 MedPAC Data Book if you cannot wait.)
- What's a voucher?
- The easy answer is "Nothing that has anything to do with Medicare." (Food stamps are vouchers. No one proposes to give seniors Medicare stamps.)
- What do private insurers have to do with Medicare?
- Everything and nothing. (Every part of Medicare - A, B, C and D - is administered by private insurers but the government, along with the senior, is the payer. By the way, if you work, this is most likely similar to the arrangement you have with your employer viz a viz health-care insurance.)
- What do for-profit insurance companies have to do with Medicare?
- The private insurance companies that run Medicare are not necessarily for-proft companies but all of the administrators of Traditional "as you know it" Democratic-party Medicare are greedy, money-grubbing for-profit insurance companies, including a few private mutuals. (You never read that fact in the mainstream media do you?)
- Other questions as they occur to me.
-- Dennis Byron
