The History Of Medicare, United States Healthcare Scheme, From Hope To Funding Meltdown
US Medicare is a social insurance program which provides health insurance coverage for people aged 65 and over, and for those who meet certain other special criteria. Medicare (US) is a single-payer health care system, similar to systems in other countries, such as Canada, Australia and the UK, except that US Medicare only covers a part of the total population. This short article reviews the history of Medicare in the United States, and examines the challenges which the program faces due to demographic changes and spiraling costs of medical treatment.
In a single-payer health care system there is one large insurance fund which pays the health costs of the entire population, or a large group of the population, such as people over 65 years of age. In these systems, an organization, the Federal government in the case of US Medicare, collects the insurance payments through taxes, and uses the fund to provide a universal health care service.
Robert M. Ball, who was a former commissioner of Social Security in the Kennedy administration, examined the financing problems for health care for the elderly in 1961. Ball concluded that the major problem was that the elderly always required more frequent and more costly health care, because of their age, but at the same time they were less able to afford to buy private health insurance.
Ball then concluded that the only possible way to finance health care for the elderly was to employ the same mechanisms which are used to finance pension provision. This means that payments are collected from those of working age, and the benefits are provided after those people have retired.
Medicare supporters then can argue that Medicare is not like an unearned entitlement, but rather a form of social insurance. The people who are benefiting from the scheme today, are those who paid into the scheme when they were working. It is true that some people end up paying more in than they get out, but that is also true of any other insurance scheme.
However many conservative politicians, including Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior, opposed Medicare. They argued that such a scheme would lead to the end of individual responsibility, and perhaps even to the advent of socialism in the US.
Medicare became law in 1965. At the time Lyndon B. Johnston was president, and he enrolled the first two Medicare members: Harry S. Truman, and Mrs. Truman, the former president and first lady.
Nowadays Medicare faces a severe funding challenge. There are two causes. Firstly the advances in medical science now mean that people tend to live much longer. This has caused a demographic shift towards an aging population. Those who are young, able to work, and required to contribute to Medicare through their taxes, are required to fund a health insurance fund for an ever increasing number of elderly beneficiaries from the scheme.
Secondly, medical costs have rapidly increased in the last 40 years. Many expensive, new treatments are not available, which were not known about when the scheme was set up.
Those responsible for the fund have predicted that if present trends continue the health insurance fund will become insolvent in 2019. One can therefore expect that in the next decade the U. S. Federal government will see fixing this Medicare crisis as one of its top domestic priorities.
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Tags: health, Insurance, Medicare, Senior Citizens