Medicare healthy at age 44

Medicare healthy at age 44

It's a fine time to celebrate the government-run, taxpayer-supported colossus in the American health care system that turns 44 this week. Medicare has done all it was supposed to do, and more.
It thrives despite apocalyptic warnings from its original opponents that ``socialized medicine'' would hamper doctors, hospitals, patients -- perhaps even doom the entire American health care system. Medicare is exceedingly popular and remarkably well-functioning despite its current critics' claims that it is singularly wasteful, out of control in some never-specified way, or at the very least, holds the potential to bankrupt us all in the next generation.

A historical truth

Medicare is where political posturing runs headlong into historical truth: It is, along with Social Security, the most successful government program -- other than its unrivaled military -- that the United States has ever created....

And it has delivered for elderly people what President Barack Obama and at least some Democrats say they want to deliver for the rest of us: universal coverage ensuring that people with medical problems will not become impoverished by their illness, with patients offered a guaranteed set of services and a choice of private doctors, hospitals and other practitioners .
``Medicare was a comprehensive -- and comprehensible -- program, available throughout the country and with a core set of benefits,'' says Judith Stein, director of the Center for Medicare Advocacy.
In other words, it delivers the opposite of what the private insurance industry has been providing. And it is doing so with a better track record of controlling costs. Beginning in 1997, the growth in Medicare's cost per beneficiary has been slower than the cost escalation in coverage delivered by private insurers....

http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/o...y/1165060.html