Medicare Can Only be Saved by Romney/Ryan

Trivia question:  Whose face is on the $1000 bill?  Answer: Grover Cleveland.  These large bills were last printed about 70 years ago.  They were used by banks to conduct large money transfers before the days of electronic banking.  There are about 165,000 still in circulation, but I doubt that you will ever see one.  How high do you think a stack of a million dollars would be in $1000 bills?  No fair looking ahead—guess!  One million dollars worth of $1000 bills will be just 4 inches high.  What about using those same bills to make a stack worth a billion dollars?  Will it be 10 inches?  Four feet?  Forty feet?  Wrong.  One billion will be 364 feet tall.  That’s half as tall as the St. Louis Gateway Arch!  Now for the money question.  How high would one trillion dollars worth of $1000 bills be?   Try 63 miles!  That is considered the altitude at which outer space officially begins.    

Why all of this interest in conceptualizing what a trillion of something means?  Because by the year 2030 it will take over $24 trillion to fund Medicare.  Imagine 24 piles of $1000 bills rising from sea level to the top of our measurable atmosphere.  If you are thinking that is impossible, you are right.   Health care costs are expanding faster than incomes, revenues, taxes, you name it.  We are like the sorcerer’s apprentice, unleashing a deluge that we can no longer control. And if you buy into the idea that we are going to be able to find a few stacks of those trillions of dollars in, “fraud” and, “waste” you are delusional.   Let’s face it, the perpetrators of the fraud are smart and motivated and the investigators are bureaucrats who get paid the same whether they catch anyone or not.  

Even the people who hate Paul Ryan and his attempts to keep this train from derailing admit that his math is right.  In February of this year, President Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, testified before Congress concerning the budget and Medicare.   Geithner acknowledged the lack of long-term deficit reduction in the Obama budget, saying "even if Congress were to enact this budget, we would still be left with, in the outer decades as millions of Americans retire, what are still unsustainable  commitments in Medicare and Medicaid." Then on the House side, in response to budget chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Geithner conceded the same point, but added, "We’re not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution to that long-term problem. What we do know is we don't like yours."

Let’s refocus the Democrats fear campaign.  There is something to be afraid of here, it is inaction. First, in Paul Ryan’s original proposal everyone who is now on Medicare, or will go on Medicare in the next decade will see NO change in their status.  Americans younger than 55 will have some choices to make, one of which includes staying with the same Medicare the rest of us have.  All of this is designed to save Medicare, not destroy it.  And save it we must.

I am on Medicare.  My mother, who died in May, benefited from Medicare.  But there is no doubt that the costs of this well-intentioned program are drowning us.  We can not ignore, diminish or short-change this problem. Scaring people to coerce votes will not solve this problem.  Saying this is a simple problem with a quick fix will not solve this.  Simple solutions only work for simple problems or simple minds. In the mean time, those towers of $1000 bills keep building up on the beach. 

Don’t stick your head in the sand, and keep the faith.