Bernie Madoff for Health Czar(Read the rest here.)
...As I mentioned in my first healthcare letter, we do not have the money to pay for our current nationalized healthcare experiments, which we call Medicare and Medicaid. To open yet another financial wound, we do not have the money to fund Social Security over the next 30 years. So before you buy something expensive, it would seem wise to ask if you can afford to maintain it. The unfunded liabilities for Medicare and Medicaid alone have been estimated at $47-trillion dollars. This is the cost of insuring 30-million Americans. We do not have enough money for these existing programs, much less to expand these services to cover the lives of 304 million Americans.
What I am telling you is that Medicare and Medicaid will run out of money. The system will go bankrupt. It will be like AIG, which was "too big to fail", but which has failed despite pouring billions into it. People in my generation, and those younger, are "investing" in a Medicare system which promises to pay big dividends in healthcare dollars during our retirement. However, the politicians running the plan understand that this is a fiscal impossibility. It is dishonest. That money will not be there for us. It will be all used up by the time we reach age 65. The reason is that there will not be enough young workers to fund the Medicare system and keep it going for the aging baby boomers. Does this scenario sound familiar to you? Have you recently read about other people who have set up scams like this? You guessed it. Medicare is a Ponzi scheme.
...So why is a doctor like me engaging in "politics" or going on a rant about the healthcare dollar? Because money is a necessary part of the discussion! When you try to buy something on a credit plan that you can't afford, it is only a matter of time before that something is repossessed. Before we scrap private healthcare and open another credit card for nationalized healthcare, we should think about what we will do when we can't afford the payments. The answer is that people won't get the medical care they need, which is what happens in Canada. In all seriousness, I'd start putting away some extra cash in the bank for the day when Bernie Madoff or his sons reject your request for an MRI of the brain. You'll need that extra money to travel to Dubai for your MRI or your knee replacement - to purchase quality healthcare in a free-market system that is not dominated by a government rationing panel.
For more advice from Dr. Knope on how protect yourself from the upcoming fiasco of "universal" Obama-Care, read this post.
