Over the past decade it has morphed into a bloated, bankrupt system that has fooled seniors into thinking that the money they put into the system would be spent on their healthcare needs. In fact, the money that has been put into the Medicare trust fund has been steadily raided by Congress to use for everything except the health of seniors. Couple this with the fact that there are more people becoming eligible for Medicare while the labor force used to fund it is shrinking, and you have conditions that mix to form the perfect recipe for the Ponzi scheme that it has become.
The answer to the problem has been a steady course of politics as usual. Both parties have been complicit in kicking the can down the road.
The only difference has been the rhetoric used to justify their behavior. On one hand, the Democrats have sought to demonize the Republicans during election cycles by bringing up the boogeyman of vouchers while enacting the Affordable Care Act which removes over 700 billion dollars in order to set up the infrastructure of Obamacare – which in reality is a process that will remove that money directly from patient care (517 billion dollars from part A which comes from the Medicare hospital trust fund, and 247 billion dollars from part B which comes from the supplemental Medicare insurance trust fund). On the other hand, the Republicans have failed to explain to the American people why the current system is not sustainable while doing nothing to help fix the situation in the hopes that they can use the lack of activity to their advantage to gain power in the next election cycle.
While both sides have been fiddling, Medicare as we know it continues to burn. Any physician that still takes Medicare will tell you that Medicare ‘as we know it’ is already gone. Neither side has had the guts to admit that they were instrumental in causing this failure to happen.
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