XPost: alt.economics, or.politics, seattle.politics
XPost: ca.politics, fl.politics
On Sat, 15 Feb 2025 07:55:38 -0800
Darth Xmas <
[email protected]d> wrote:
On Fri, 14 Feb 2025 09:58:12 -0700, mxplztylc <[email protected]> wrote:
Nope.
Phased out so the present retirees are not cored out.
No, If a person doesn't have a pension they can use MAID.
Stop clipping my reply context, asshat!
========================================================
Medicare and SS should be canceled.
Nope.
Phased out so the present retirees are not cored out.
=========================================================
1.) Social Insecurity MUST be paid out for those who literally rely on
it for their retirement income - period/non-negotiable!
2.) The same holds for Medicare which will require a complete overhaul
of health care pricing, availability, and regulation to insure
non-predatory pricing and equal access.
Here, fucking LEARN something:
https://www.cato.org/social-security
Social Security is not sustainable without reform. Simply put, it cannot pay promised future benefits with current levels of taxation. Yet raising taxes or cutting benefits will only make a bad deal worse. However, allowing younger workers to privately
invest their Social Security taxes through individual accounts will improve Social Security’s rate of return; provide better retirement benefits; treat women, minorities, and low-income workers more fairly; and give workers real ownership and control
of their retirement funds.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/social-security-reform-defusing-ticking-bomb
Cut Benefits?
Cutting Social Security benefits, however, would have a positive impact on both the system's finances and the government's general balance sheet. Of course, there are many different ways to reduce future Social Security payments with very different
impacts on recipients. The bipartisan Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, for instance, has recommended a broad array of benefit changes, including raising the retirement age to 69 by 2075, with the early retirement age rising to 64 over the
same period, reforming the formula for annual cost of living adjustments (COLA's), and trimming benefits for high-income recipients.
A better approach would be to change the formula used to calculate the accrual of benefits so that they are indexed to price inflation rather than national wage growth. Since wages tend to grow at a rate roughly one-percentage point faster than prices,
such a change would hold future Social Security benefits constant in real terms, but eliminate the benefit escalation that is built into the current formula. Estimates suggest that making this change alone would result in a 35 percent reduction in Social
Security's currently scheduled level of benefits, bringing the system into balance by 2050. Variations on this approach would apply the formula change only to higher income seniors, preserving the current wage-indexed formula for low-income seniors.
Other benefit reductions that have been discussed at one time or another include: increasing the number of years included in income averaging as part of the benefit formula from 35 to 38 years, restructuring spousal benefits, and various means/asset-
testing schemes. But, Social Security taxes are already so high, relative to benefits, that Social Security has quite simply become a bad deal for younger workers, providing a low, below-market rate-of-return.
Save and Invest
It makes sense, therefore, to combine any reduction in government-provided benefits with an option for younger workers to save and invest a portion of their Social Security taxes through individual accounts. A proposal by scholars from the Cato Institute
that combines the wage-price indexing proposal described above with personal accounts equal to 6.2 percent of wages, was scored by actuaries with the Social Security Administration in 2005 as reducing Social Security's unfunded liabilities by $6.3
trillion, roughly half the system's predicted shortfall at that time. If the Cato plan had been adopted in 2005, the system would have begun running surpluses by 2046. Indeed, by the end of the 75-year actuarial window, the system would have been running
surpluses in excess of $1.8 trillion. At the same time, SSA actuaries concluded that average-wage workers who were age 45 or younger could expect higher benefits under the Cato proposal than Social Security would otherwise be able to pay. While there is
no more current scoring available, there is no reason to presume that savings or benefits would be substantially different today.
Personal accounts would also solve some of the other problems with the current Social Security system. Under the current system, workers have no ownership of their benefits; they are left totally dependent on the good will of 535 politicians to determine
what they will receive in retirement. Moreover, benefits are not inheritable, and the program is a barrier to wealth accumulation. Finally, the current program unfairly penalizes African Americans, working women, and others. In short, it is a program
crying out for reform. By giving workers ownership and control over a portion of their retirement funds, personal accounts are the only reform measure that deals with those issues.
Of course opponents of personal accounts have pointed to the recent
struggles of the stock market to suggest that they are too risky to be
relied on for retirement. The reality, however, is that despite recent volatility in the market, long-term investment represents a remarkably
safe retirement strategy.
Social Security is not sustainable without reform. Simply put, it
cannot pay promised future benefits with current levels of taxation.
Yet, raising taxes or cutting benefits will only make a bad deal worse.
At the same time, workers have no ownership of their benefits, and
Social Security benefits are not inheritable.
As for Medicare...what are you a fucking Obama-bot shill?
https://www.cato.org/blog/obama-proposes-eliminating-medicare-advantage-ousting-9-million-seniors-their-health-plans
On This Week with George Stephanopolous, president-elect Barack Obama proposed eliminating the ENTIRE Medicare Advantage program:
We’ve got to eliminate programs that don’t work, and I’ll give you an example in the health care area. We are spending a lot of money subsidizing the insurance companies around something called Medicare Advantage, a program that gives them
subsidies to accept Medicare recipients but doesn’t necessarily make people on Medicare healthier.
And if we eliminate that and other programs, we can potentially save $200 billion out of the health care system that we’re currently spending, and take that money and use it in ways that are actually going to make people healthier and improve quality.
So what our challenge is going to be is identifying what works and putting more money into that, eliminating things that don’t work, and making things that we have more efficient.
Medicare Advantage allows seniors to choose a private health plan rather than get their health coverage from the traditional Medicare program. The Left has complained Medicare Advantage costs taxpayers more than if those seniors remained in the
traditional Medicare program. (I agree, though the reason is not because government is more efficient than private insurance.) The Left has long dreamt of eliminating Medicare Advantage, in part because it poses a threat to their plans for a completely
government-run, single-payer health care system. Yet the Left has had to settle for attacking and attempting to eliminate the “overpayments” that Medicare Advantage plans receive. Of course, one can eliminate Medicare Advantage stealthily by reducing
payments to private plans until none will participate.
For Obama to suggest eliminating Medicare Advantage outright, however, is extraordinary. First, Obama made a campaign promise that he will let Americans keep their current health insurance. Eliminating Medicare Advantage would force 9 million seniors out
of their current health plans and back into traditional Medicare. Second, a man who wants to reform America’s health care sector ought not begin the effort by proposing to take something away from seniors, America’s largest and most politically
active voting block. Maybe the Obama folks haven’t learned the lessons of the Clinton health care battle.
Eliminating Medicare Advantage would be bad for non-seniors, too,
because it would block innovations that make medicine better, cheaper,
and safer. The main reason that the U.S. health care sector fails to
coordinate care, fails to provide patients with electronic medical
records, and fails to prevent medical errors is that whenever providers
try to do those things, the traditional Medicare program’s
change-resistant payment system punishes them for doing so. (Universal
coverage kills.) Medicare Advantage plans use different financial
incentives that actually encourage coordination, EMRs, and error
reduction. What a novel thought…
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)