The federal government has agreed to expand Medicare benefits by spending $400 billion on prescription drugs for the elderly over 10 years.
The move has some economists worried, as there is no budget surplus to pay for the expansion. The money is "borrowed" from the public for now, and people who are now children will end up paying for much of the increase in the future, likely through higher taxes.
Others fear that the expansion will end up costing far more than the $400 billion, as it is likely that the use of prescription drugs will increase when the government begins subsidizing much of their costs. Additionally, Medicare recipients may campaign for even greater drug coverage.
New York Times August 19, 2003 (Free Registration Required)
You can bet your last dime that the program will cost us (the federal government) far more than $400 billion.
The Medicare expansion will not yield reform--until a radical change in the paradigm occurs, health care costs will continue to escalate. Drug companies stand to gain the most from the bill as the demand for drugs, along with drug prices, continues to rise. The pharmaceutical companies will get paid and taxpayers will be left paying for the extra costs. It’s no wonder that the pharmaceutical industry recently spent $135 million lobbying for the new Medicare bill.
This expansion is a prescription for disaster. Another socialized medical system will only repeat the Medicare catastrophe we already have.
The solution is to change the entire system. Unless we change the system, drug companies will continue to extract hundreds of billions of dollars from our economy with virtually no benefit--other than making themselves richer.
Our country will become increasingly unable to support such an expense without major sacrifices by millions of people.
The solution is to redirect the spending to care that will build the health of the country and provide people with the energy to be more productive. The extra productivity would theoretically create more than enough additional wealth to pay for all the health care that we would need.
When our nation is focused on health achievement, rather than disease treatment, the total cost of providing medical care would dramatically decline, because healthy people require less medical resources.
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