Health Care Reform

Why are people so concerned about a government option and what are the consequences? In order to answer that the reader should take a look at Medicare. Medicare is a government insurance plan. Virtually every senior’s medical expenses are covered by the government. Most seniors adore this program and why shouldn’t they? The health care is provided by the free market and the cost is zero. Or is it?
Medicare cost $110 billion in 1990, and Medicaid cost $74 billion the same year. Now in 2008 these two programs cost $682 billion. If that still doesn’t get your attention, when today’s college student reaches retirement around 2054, Social Security and Medicare part A alone will need a 25.7 percent payroll tax. That is a quarter for every dollar you make in your lifetime. 
By this time it is projected  (by the CBO, not me) that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will take up the entire federal budget. Medicare’s trustees estimated that Congress would need to put $80 trillion in an interest bearing account in 2008 in order to pay for unfunded liabilities. The entire economic output of the U.S. is only $15 trillion dollars.  How is this sustainable?
Now our politicians want to extend this coverage to all Americans. Keep in mind that Medicare started out as a government option and now there are virtually no private health plans for senior citizens.  This is a message to all of the students at C of C.
There is no way that we can take on the rest of the nation if we cannot afford to pay for the seniors’ healthcare. There are other solutions out there but no one on Capitol hill is considering them. Please, for your own sake, wake up and stand for some degree of sanity.  Before we can even consider a “public option,”  our nation needs to deal with the major impending disasters of current entitlements. 
Do you really want control of your healthcare, your life, in the hands of the people who ran the war in Iraq, the Hurricane Katrina recovery, our Social Security and the Cash for Clunkers program? I rest my case.
-Colin Ross