Medicare Crisis
Medicare is another project of Lyndon Baines Johnson Great Society. Spending is obviously out of control. On June 5th the government announced that the Medicare Trust Fund would go broke if something isn’t done with the spending (nationaldebt). In 1965 when LBJ started Health and Medicare, the Total Federal Spending for the year was $101 Billion. By the year 2000 we will spend over 4 times than amount on Health and Medicare alone, and Medicare will equal the annual spending for Defense (CNN). Medicare was a program that was not acceptable gracefully by the Liberal/Socialists. You might keep this in mind when we get to the point where we have to choose what we CAN do versus what we would LIKE to do. According to CMS the government predict that if healthcare keeps going the in the current direction the cost of Medicare will have exceeded defense spending, unlike other Healthcare systems the US healthcare has been a problem for the government as well for it has added to the enormous debt the country already has.
Another major problem of Medicare is that the government does not regulate Medicare enough (Medicare). Medicare affects all different aspects of different programs. For instance Medicare affects Social Security (national debt). Social Security has already exceeded Defense spending by almost double. Just like Medicare, Social Security is being abused. So many people abuse the system, by that i mean people take advantage of it. It is different from Medicare because less people can use Social Security because it is set aside for the tax payers of this country.
The good news is that Social Security is not endangering of losing money or even going bankrupt. The federal healthcare program for the elderly is a system of checks and balances where change is expected. The fact that we have something within the next year or so to ensure that nothing goes bad in the year 2001 or 2002 is expected (CNN1). But the government is not going to
References: Retrieved September 11, 2002, from http://cms.hhs.gov/ regulations/hopps/ Medicare program [Electronic version]. Monterey County: The Herald. Retrieved September 12, 2002 http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/mcherald/news/nation/4057683.htm Medicare Payment Systems (2011, October 07). Retrieved November 05, 2011, from http://www.medicare.gov/ www.medicare.gov/caregivers/partners-current.html https://www.cms.gov/History/ http://nationaldebt.us/