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.

Related Articles:

Medicare Expansion: A Prescription for Disaster

Medicare Reform: What to Expect From the Expansion

More Medicare Spending Does Not Mean Better Care

$100 Billion for Medicare Prescriptions Will Further Devastate US Medicine