One definition of “tweak” is “small adjustment.” One example of vast understatement is Wisconsin Sen. Herb Kohl’s assessment that “tweaks” are all that is needed to guarantee Social Security’s fiscal sustainability. He offered that absurd assurance last week on a projected $5.3 trillion shortfall in the system over the next 75 years.
As chairman of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, Sen. Kohl should take special care to be more candid about what it will take to save Social Security. And we all should be especially wary about extremely long-range social spending forecasts, which have an expensive tendency to underestimate eventual costs.
Yet citing research by panel staff, Sen. Kohl told The Associated Press, “Modest changes can be made over time that will keep the program in surplus. They are not draconian, as the report points out, and they can be done and will be done.”
“Modest changes”?
Not really. Tweaks will save it if life expectancy drops to 65. That is what ObamaCare is designed to do. If you eliminate the specialists, and focus on primary care and emergency surgery (appendicitis etc.) and eliminate the folks who keep 70 year olds healthy with their stents, baloons, dialysis, etc. then Social Security will be saved.
Obamacare is basically a set of taxes, together with regulation designed to encourage an interventional cardiologist to become a “concierge” care primary care practitioner with a “special interest” in cardiology.
The numbers will work if it is played that way, and it will be played that way because it has already happened to Pediatrics. Pediatric specialty care has basically died thanks to sick kids almost always being dumped onto Medicaid. Pediatric rheumatologists or neurologists have almost all dropped back to being pediatricians. The parents of the wealthy take their kids to Johns Hopkins. The parents of the poor accept the fact that “nothing can be done”. The state saves money. Nobody notices or cares.
Those who live past 70 and use any kind of medical technology should either afford it or die. If they rely on public assistance, they should justify it. Poor people at 70 are intrinsically worth less than rich people at 70.
This is what Clueless seems to be indicating. He may be right.
“Poor people at 70 are intrinsically worth less than rich people at 70.”
I believe that all people are equally valuble to God. However they are not equal to government. They are clearly not equally valuble to the American people.
Plumbing got our life span up to 45 before WWI. Basic health care/antibiotics/vaccines/surgery got our life span up to 65 after WWII. The increase of our life expectancy to 85 which is what has broken Medicare and SSI assumptions are due to specialty care and ICU care which keep fragile old people with multiple medical problems pottering about in their homes long after they have died in every other country in Europe. Those people drain SSI and Medicare.
Under Health Care Reform, specialty/ICU care will be reimbursed below what they cost to provide. Thus, all providers of this higher level care (who by definition are also capable of providing lower level care) will be forced to switch in order to stay solvent. Even a teenager mowing lawns for pocket money figures out that if gas costs 2.50 a gallon, and mowing a lawn takes a gallon of gas, you can’t charge folks a dollar to mow their lawn and stay in business. If the kid cannot raise his price, he will find something else to do, like washing windows, which doesn’t require gasoline.
But this was the health care reform that you wanted, John. It is you and those who voted with you who have made the calculation that “poor people at 70 are intrinsically worth less than rich people at 70”.
Those of us who actually take care of poor and old people (and I volunteer at our free clinic twice monthly) wished to lower costs by decreasing the burden of litigation and regulation (the cost of the “gasoline”). Those who don’t actually do the work of taking care of such individuals but who wished to be SEEN as “CARING” preferred to “stick it to the doctors”. They have been victorious. But this is what happens when folks engage in the politics of envy. People die. People will die over this. Just as children with complex problems have been quietly dying over the past 20 years when the Medicaid calculus changed to encourage pediatric specialists to drop back to being pediatricians. It is part of the reason that Envy is a “mortal sin”. Sin kills. Not necessarily just spiritually.