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Boating All Out

In article ,
says...

Medicare is 15-20 % fraud. That is the flaw in having the tax payers
shoveling money at private providers The idea of government providers
will simply not fly here.

Nobody mentioned government providers except you.
Harder keeping you on track than deplume.
Fraud is ended by honest government with the right tools to address it.
If that isn't happening it's because the politicians are bought off by
the private medical industry, who benefit from the fraud.
See who proposes funding for Medicare fraud investigations and who
votes against it.

Until you address the lawyer tax you also are not going to be cutting
medical costs any time soon.

They should do it just to shut you up.
It's mostly a red herring and adds little to the cost.
"Defensive medicine" will still prevail, because it's a professional
means of treatment - and it makes more money for the medical profession.

The other issue is end of life care.
Any effort to limit care to dead people is seen as rationing, another
problem those other countries don't seem to mind. If they are rich
enough they come here for the care they want.

That's the hardest nut to crack. Best that can be done is end-of-life
counseling and hope people are responsible.
If they're not, "death panels" could be real for public money.
If sensible parameters were proposed by the medical community there
wouldn't be much resistance, except from the politically inspired.
And that part of medicine getting rich from it.

Most of those countries are broke too so they are going to be making a
lot of hard decisions about their socialism.

Riiight. I'll wait for them to kill their health care and old age
pension systems.
But I won't hold my breath.

If we don't get a handle on this debt problem you will be worried
about food for your kids. Health care will be a distant dream.

Riiight. Fix debt by replacing Medicare with death vouchers and make it
an impossible dream.
There are plenty of approaches to fixing the debt.

Of course. My opinion is a society should provide health care to all at
an affordable cost, and that old folks should get their SS checks, which
are already low enough for the vast majority to qualify as "poverty"
income.

That was all SS was ever intended to be, a safety net, not a hammock

And that's all it is for most collecting it. I just said that.
The average SS check is about $1150 a month.
Here's a solution for cutting benefits.
Cap benefits at $1400 a month.
For a single that's enough above poverty level so you don't qualify for
unpaid government handouts.
I'll take a good hit.

The WWII generation had the foresight to have lots of kids so there
were plenty of workers to fund their retirement. (roughly 16:1)

Now those kids are coming for theirs and the money is all gone.
There are only 3 workers per boomer today. SS worked because it was
pay as you go and there were plenty of payers.
There are simply not enough payers now.

You keep beating that drum but I don't hear it.
We've been down this road.
Paying off the trust fund over the next the next 26 years is a trivial
drain on government revenues. Maintains 100% of current benefits.
At that point 75% of current benefits can be paid on SS revenues alone.
THAT'S IF NOTHING IS DONE TO INCREASE SS REVENUES OR MEANS TEST.
What is so hard to understand about that?
Do you have a plan to reduce benefits to those who need them?
Or means test out those who don't need them?
Tell me about it.
I'm sick of you whining and not offering solutions.
This is a simple accounting issue to me, tinged with my human instincts.
I offered one solution above on the benefit side that probably fixes it
forever.
Now you put up or shut up.
Let's see what you're made of.
I suspect it's ham only from the right side of the hog.
But I might be surprised.