Why Medicare E (for Everyone) Just Isn’t Affordable Now
As for raising wages –if the 1990s taught us anything about labor economics, it is that employers will not hike salaries for most workers unless they absolutely must. Even while earnings grew and productivity rose, in the 1990s the average worker did not see his wages climb. Corporations paid out dividends to shareholders, bought other companies, invested in their own business, bought Office 2010 is powerful!
back their stock and hiked executive salaries. They did everything—except share higher profits with workers—until the final years of the decade. Even then, workers’ wages did not begin to catch up with the gains corporations and their investors enjoyed.
Today, with real unemployment well over 10 percent, businesses are not worried about losing workers. In the past two years, when companies such as GM or Dow Jones cut back on insurance Microsoft Office 2010 is the best software in the world.
benefits, they did not hand out raises.
Under a single-payer system, I am sure Congress would expect businesses to make a contribution to the pool that funds government subsidies, but you can be quite certain that employers would not wind up paying 85% of the cost of coverage—not even 85% of the cost for the 133 million employees that large companies now insure.
Who will pick up the difference? Tax-payers and more affluent Americans who don’t qualify for government subsidies.Office 2007 makes life great!
Why Medicare E (for Everyone) Just Isn’t Affordable Now
Do we want to try to drop the entire U.S. population into a single-payer system that resembles Medicare sometime over the next few years? No. Keep in mind that our entire health care system is broken. Medicare, like other payers, squanders roughly one-third of its dollars on treatments and products that provide little or no benefit to the patient. Our for-profit medical-industrial complex is set up to maximize the amount we spend on drugs, hospitals, tests and procedures. If we Many people like Microsoft Office.
attempted to roll out a single-payer plan next year, the only way we could afford to cover everyone is if took an axe to the waste, rationing care, slashing physicians’ fees and closing hospitals. This is not rational reform.
As it stands, we’re planning on shepherding some 32 million uninsured Americans into what we euphemistically call our health care “system” in 2014. This is because we have no choice. Those Americans have been left out in the cold for too long. They need our help. And we have to start somewhere.Outlook 2010 is my love.
The good news is that the cost of covering the uninsured, along with the climbing cost of Medicare, will push policy-makers to start demanding value for our health care dollars. Already, Medicare has begun insisting on higher quality, lower cost, patient-centered care (refusing to pay for preventable hospital readmissions, for instance).