Congressman Ryan: Let’s make a deal!

image source: PPJ Gazette

Marti Oakley, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

Dear Congressman Ryan:

I have seen you many times on Lame Street Media promoting your grandiose plan to kill Medicare. I realize targeting those least able to defend themselves from yet another round of the neo-con movement to redistribute the wealth to the upper 3% while leaving the country in ruins as jobs are shipped out and as corporations plunder the country, is underway.

While helping to spend the country into untenable debt and rolling out the red carpet to foreign investors and corporations who are steadily consuming everything in sight, I realize that you have to dispense with any program or initiative which would lend support to the elderly, that class of useless eaters so despised by so many of you.

While railing against Medicare and what it costs the country, you never made mention of what it costs the country to support you while you are in office and even when you leave.  For someone whose existence is now predicated upon the parasitic relationship of elected officials dependent on taxpayers, I am surprised that you did not readily identify yourself and the rest of congress as an unsustainable drain on the economy.  We can no longer afford to support you people, especially when you contribute virtually nothing to the economy or GDP while availing yourselves of special privileges, perks and financial enrichments.

Social Security, Medicare burning through funds

A health care activist
© AFP/Getty Images/File Chris Hondros

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States is burning through its health care and retirement fund pools faster than planned, with the Medicare trust fund to be exhausted by 2024, five years earlier than expected, officials said Friday.

A combination of higher costs and lower-than-expected revenues has worsened the outlook for Medicare as well as for Social Security, which will use up its huge trust fund in 2036, one year earlier than was projected last year, plan trustees said in their annual reports.

They emphasized that the forecasts point to dates when the level of payouts to beneficiaries to match incoming funds -- mostly payroll deductions and investment earnings -- will have to be reduced.

Medicare, which offers health care to retired and disabled Americans, would only be able to offset 90 percent of the costs of care, while Social Security would pay out only 75 percent of scheduled benefits, after the respective dates.

The Medicare report stressed that the program had gained a "sizable improvement" in its financial outlook due to the controversial Affordable Care Act of the administration of President Barack Obama.

US Republicans vow steep long-term spending cuts

Editor's Note: "Ryan's plan would privatize the Medicare health program for older Americans, giving beneficiaries vouchers to pay for care." Of course it will.  Using a "crisis" to transfer more taxpayer funds to private cartels.

Republican Representative Paul Ryan
© AFP/File Jim Watson

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - President Barack Obama's Republican foes, warning the debt-heavy US economy is headed for collapse, unveiled a plan on Tuesday to slash government spending by $6 trillion over the next decade.

Republican Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House of Representatives' Budget Committee, showcased the party's "Path to Prosperity" as a direct rebuke to what he denounced as Obama's free-spending ways.

"The United States is heading toward a debt crisis," Ryan said in a slickly produced video on his committee web site. "We face a crushing burden of debt, which will take down our economy, and will lower our living standards."

Welfare State: Handouts Make Up One-Third of U.S. Wages

John Melloy
CNBC

Government payouts—including Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance—make up more than a third of total wages and salaries of the U.S. population, a record figure that will only increase if action isn’t taken before the majority of Baby Boomers enter retirement.

Even as the economy has recovered, social welfare benefits make up 35 percent of wages and salaries this year, up from 21 percent in 2000 and 10 percent in 1960, according to TrimTabs Investment Research using Bureau of Economic Analysis data.

“The U.S. economy has become alarmingly dependent on government stimulus,” said Madeline Schnapp, director of Macroeconomic Research at TrimTabs, in a note to clients. “Consumption supported by wages and salaries is a much stronger foundation for economic growth than consumption based on social welfare benefits.”

Read Full Article

RELATED ARTICLE:
Unemployed: Stop Searching for a Job and Learn to Forage

Enter your email address to subscribe to our newsletter:


Delivered by FeedBurner

Doctors say Medicare cuts force painful decision about elderly patients

Anthony Freda Illustration

N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post

Want an appointment with kidney specialist Adam Weinstein of Easton, Md.? If you're a senior covered by Medicare, the wait is eight weeks.

How about a checkup from geriatric specialist Michael Trahos? Expect to see him every six months: The Alexandria-based doctor has been limiting most of his Medicare patients to twice yearly rather than the quarterly checkups he considers ideal for the elderly. Still, at least he'll see you. Top-ranked primary care doctor Linda Yau is one of three physicians with the District's Foxhall Internists group who recently announced they will no longer be accepting Medicare patients.

"It's not easy. But you realize you either do this or you don't stay in business," she said.

Doctors across the country describe similar decisions, complaining that they've been forced to shift away from Medicare toward higher-paying, privately insured or self-paying patients in response to years of penny-pinching by Congress.

Read Full Article

RELATED ARTICLES:
America's Healthcare Insanity
A Liberal's Awakening to the Reality of Obamacare

Fresh food that lasts from eFoods Direct (Ad)

Live Superfoods It is time to Wake Up! You too, can join the "Global Political Awakening"!

Print this page

U.S. and Britain in Partnership to Standardize Domination

Brandon Turbeville

Activist Post 

It is an unfortunate reality that whatever policies are implemented in the UK are eventually implemented here in the United States. It was only a short time before Britain’s increased domestic surveillance, horrid healthcare system, and curtailment of free speech reached the shores of America.

Of course, the United States serves as a breeding ground for the exportation of its own brand of tyranny – i.e. militarized police forces etc.– to England. A more informed observer might view this trade-off of oppression as a more organized attempt at the implementation of a standardized system of domination . . .  and this observer would be correct. But, regardless, it is true that even a casual observer can view the domestic policies of the country across the Atlantic as indications of what is coming to their own. 

Recently, it was announced by the British government that 1 million elderly British citizens who have paid exorbitant taxes and endured sub-par healthcare for years will now be given a personal healthcare budget which they themselves will have to administer. After generations of being told that citizens were not individuals but part of the collective, British ministers are now claiming that healthcare can no longer be left to the state and that it is “everyone’s responsibility.” In past years, when Britons were being trained to accept higher taxes and reduction in healthcare, “everyone’s responsibility” meant the collective society as a whole bore the collective burden. Now, when healthcare rationing for the elderly becomes more prominent, “everyone’s responsibility” means that each individual has to worry about their own costs. Of course, there is no likelihood of taxes going down as a result. George Orwell’s Big Brother would indeed be proud of the doublespeak being successfully implemented in his home country today. 

These personal care budgets would force the elderly to ration out their pittance from the UK’s National Health Service in order to purchase procedures and care from private companies. Paul Burstow, Liberal Democrat care services minister commented that “Personal budgets give people choice, control, and independence.” War is peace indeed. 

Besides cutting care for the “non-productive” elderly by reducing the amount of services rendered, these personal care budgets also have a psychological function. By forcing seniors to choose their services on the basis of costs and forcing them to look at the prices of these services before  purchasing them, they are being conditioned (as well as the children who aid them in this process) to justify why the British government is cutting these costs. They are now “learning the lesson of finite resources.”

Unfortunately, there is a parallel between the newly instituted British policy and the new healthcare legislation being implemented in the United States. While the Brits may be a bit ahead of us in the rationing department, it is only because our new healthcare legislation is just beginning to take effect. Rationing boards -- labeled death panels during the debate over the bill -- were largely dismissed by the mainstream media even though they existed as plain as day. Such treatment was mainly an attempt by the media to reduce any real discussion of real issues to a traditional democrat v. republican sideshow. Nevertheless, the Coordinating Council on Comparative Cost Effectiveness Research  had already been created in the stimulus bill months before, and stood ready and waiting for the healthcare bill to pass. 

While radical Paul Krugman argued that “death panels” didn’t exist and that those who said they did were merely conspiracy theorists, right-wingers, and/or racists, after the bill passed he went on to admit on a variety of talk shows that death panels did, in fact, exist and that they would be extremely helpful in reducing the costs of healthcare. (See here and here). There is really no debate now as to whether or not these panels exist or even whether or not healthcare will be rationed. The only question now is how much rationing is going to occur. Unfortunately, the well informed already know the answer to this question.

Mirroring the British decision to force the elderly to accept a personal budget for their care, the United States, as a result of the healthcare legislation, will be cutting Medicare and Medicaid by close to $500 billion. In true Orwellian fashion, these cuts are labeled as “savings.” However, these “savings” have to come from somewhere and there is no getting away from the fact that what they will come from is the slashing of services and payments to the elderly and the poor. 

It is for this reason that Medicare’s MEDPAC will also morph into a death panel. As a result of the slashing of billions of dollars from the Medicare budget, MEDPAC will oversee the cuts to Medicare that determine the quality of life for millions of senior citizens all over the country. 

MEDPAC will be responsible for examining which services, procedures, medicines etc. are “cost effective” and which are not. For many seniors, MEDPAC will be making life and death decisions. The same is the case with Medicaid, which provides healthcare assistance to the poor.

What we are witnessing is the implementation of a eugenics program that was dreamed up long ago but is finally beginning to come to fruition. With such drastic cuts to healthcare benefits for the poor and elderly, as well as the legislation itself which limits care given to those with chronic illnesses and disabilities, we are seeing a system in which the term “cost effectiveness” replaces “unfit” and “undesirable.” The entire population has been engaged in a war of attrition and an attack has been launched against its most vulnerable members – children, the disabled, and the elderly – and it’s time we fight back.   

Brandon Turbeville is an author out of Mullins, South Carolina. He has a Bachelor’s Degree from Francis Marion University where he earned the Pee Dee Electric Scholar’s Award as an undergraduate. He has had numerous articles published dealing with a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, and civil liberties. He is a regular contributor to Activist Post, and is the author of Codex Alimentarius - The End of Health Freedom 


Recently by Brandon Turbeville
Globalism, Think Tanks, and "The New World Order"
The Tyranny of Codex Alimentarius

Fresh food that lasts from eFoods Direct (Ad)

Live Superfoods It is time to Wake Up! You too, can join the "Global Political Awakening"!

Print this page