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Urin Asshole Urin Asshole is offline
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First recorded activity by BoatBanter: Feb 2013
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Default An article about medical costs

On Tue, 12 Mar 2013 21:25:24 -0400, wrote:

On Tue, 12 Mar 2013 17:13:30 -0700, Urin Asshole
wrote:

On Tue, 12 Mar 2013 19:22:34 -0400,
wrote:

On Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:04:30 -0700, Urin Asshole
wrote:

On Tue, 12 Mar 2013 11:08:49 -0400,
wrote:

On Tue, 12 Mar 2013 08:44:49 -0400, iBoaterer wrote:

What in the article on health care costs do you disagree with and why?
Please give examples proving it wrong.

Brill did a lot of good research and I believe the cost numbers he
wrote but I disagree that simply putting everyone on Medicare would
fix anything.
Perhaps if they would actually tell us what the tax increase in your
FICA would have to be to do this, people would understand.
Just to pay what Medicare actually costs for seniors right now, the
tax needs to go up about 4% on your "first dollar" income with no cap
(total, both sides).
We spend well over two times what MC takes in with a 3% tax and the
trend is going more in the red every day

Cause you don't know what the **** you're taking about.. that's why
you "disagree."

Are you trying to say the SSA trustees report is a lie?


I'm saying that when you say this **** "but I disagree that simply
putting everyone on Medicare would fix anything" you're making ****
up.


Do I need to tell you what page of the article we are talking about?

Start with the bold print "The way out of the sinkhole"


So, perhaps you need to read that section??

You mean this:

"I was driving through central Florida a year or two ago," says
Medicare's Blum. "And it seemed like every billboard I saw advertised
some hospital with these big shiny buildings or showed some new wing
of a hospital being constructed ... So when you tell me that the
hospitals say they are losing money on Medicare and shifting costs
from Medicare patients to other patients, my reaction is that Central
Florida is overflowing with Medicare patients and all those hospitals
are expanding and advertising for Medicare patients. So you can't tell
me they're losing money ... Hospitals don't lose money when they serve
Medicare patients."

or this:

"If that's the case, I asked, why not just extend the program to
everyone and pay for it all by charging people under 65 the kinds of
premiums they would pay to private insurance companies? "That's not
for me to say," Blum replied.

In the debate over controlling Medicare costs, politicians from both
parties continue to suggest that Congress raise the age of eligibility
for Medicare from 65 to 67. Doing so, they argue, would save the
government tens of billions of dollars a year. So it's worth noting
another detail about the case of Janice S., which we examined earlier.
Had she felt those chest pains and gone to the Stamford Hospital
emergency room a month later, she would have been on Medicare, because
she would have just celebrated her 65th birthday.

If covered by Medicare, Janice S.'s $21,000 bill would have been
deeply discounted and, as is standard, Medicare would have picked up
80% of the reduced cost. The bottom line is that Janice S. would
probably have ended up paying $500 to $600 for her 20% share of her
heart-attack scare. And she would have paid only a fraction of that —
maybe $100 — if, like most Medicare beneficiaries, she had paid for
supplemental insurance to cover most of that 20%.

In fact, those numbers would seem to argue for lowering the Medicare
age, not raising it — and not just from Janice S.'s standpoint but
also from the taxpayers' side of the equation. That's not a liberal
argument for protecting entitlements while the deficit balloons. It's
just a matter of hardheaded arithmetic."