Wonkbook: 84 percent oppose Ryanâs Medicare plan You know whatâs not popular? Reforming Medicare such that beneficiaries âreceive a check or voucher from the government each year for a fixed amount they can use to shop for their own private health insurance policy.â According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 65 percent of Americans oppose the idea -- about the same number who dismissed it in 1995. And if theyâre told that the cost of private insurance for seniors is projected to outpace the cost of Medicare insurance for seniors -- which is exactly what CBO projects -- more than 80 percent of Americans oppose the plan. But itâs not just sweepingly ideological reforms that are unpopular. Cutting Medicare polls poorly even if you leave out the details. Almost 80 percent of Americans oppose Medicare cuts in the abstract, while 70 percent oppose Medicaid cuts. Slightly over half of the country wants the Defense Department left alone. The only deficit-reduction option that is popular? Raising taxes on the rich. That gets the go-ahead from 72 percent of us -- though, as any budget wonk will tell you, it canât solve anything beyond a small fraction of our fiscal problem. --------------- Many americans don't understand the problem: Medicare Tax: What You Pay For Medicare Won't Cover Your Costs You paid your Medicare taxes all those years and want your money's worth: full benefits after you retire. Nearly three out of five people say in a recent Associated Press-GfK poll that they paid into the system so they deserve their full benefits â no cuts. But a newly updated financial analysis shows that what people paid into the system doesn't come close to covering the full value of the medical care they can expect to receive as retirees. Consider an average-wage, two-earner couple together earning $89,000 a year. Upon retiring in 2011, they would have paid $114,000 in Medicare payroll taxes during their careers. But they can expect to receive medical services â from prescriptions to hospital care â worth $355,000, or about three times what they put in. The estimates by economists Eugene Steuerle and Stephanie Rennane of the Urban Institute think tank illustrate the huge disconnect between widely-held perceptions and the numbers behind Medicare's shaky financing. Although Americans are worried about Medicare's long-term solvency, few realize the size of the gap. ---------- Never head of the Urban Institute think tank, but as long as it's not the Heritage Foundation, we can assume the numbers are about right. O yeah, unless Grandma Squidbilly enters the 2012 race, Obama will run on "Republicans want to cut Medicare/SS" to win it easy.
This sums it up right here. It's well above your pay grade (gov't dole recipient?) to analyze the work of any think tank. No one should pay the slightest bit of attention to anthing you post. Most of the 84% have no idea what's really going on with Medicare or what the studies blindly assume or leave out. They're just like you. They just want their "free" cheese.
Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC the other day rambled off roughly the same figures, for every dollar collected, people are expected to spend $3. So it's pretty clear neither of you have heard of this ratio before. MK is just mad cause he looked like a fool on the other threads.
I'm not sure it should necessarily be a dollar-for-dollar comparison in absolute terms. There is, after all, the matter of time value of money.
Oh please. I actually have a life and am not going to spend countless hours arguing with braindead shills like yourself. Especially when you get cornered and have no counter arguments other than a laundry list of logical fallacies. But as for Medicare: when it passed 1965, it was projected to cost $3 billion in 1992. The acual cost that year? $110 billion. Based on demographic trends and even worse projections made now by the gov't (see the horrid stuff used to promote Obamacare "savings"), expect future projections to be even further off the mark. Why can't you just stay off a trading site since you know nothing about the subject or any other productive pursuit?
It is not enough for you that in recent years the rich have been paying less in taxes than they have in decades? The party should continue while everyone else should just look forward to erosion of services and benefits? Well, aren't you special.
You're talking about in your country, or the USA? If the latter, why on Earth would anyone care what you think?