Go fund me healthcare
This wasn’t supposed to be a website that hosts popularity contests where if you lose, you die.
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This wasn’t supposed to be a website that hosts popularity contests where if you lose, you die.
Maybe if we made a fun video for single payer medicare for all, it would go viral.
except for this cranky old man out there who thinks single payer needs to mean “worker paid”
if it is to have a chance of working for the next eighty years like you-know-what
or maybe you don’t understand this at all.
Coberly:
~50% of Medicare is paid by us. The rest to taxes and interests paid, etc. Used to be a pie chart around that showed that. Also: “Deaths from COVID reduced Medicare costs by 2.9% in 2021, the trustees found. That’s because those who died of the disease previously had, on average, higher ongoing medical costs than those who survived the pandemic.” I assumed similar happened with SS also. Many paid in and will never draw from it. Axios
Run
thank you for telling us. I already knew that Medicare was paid partly out of generl taxes. it also has no cap and a much higher tax on the rich than the rest of us. I think all that is a mistake. It should be paid for the way Social Security [oasdi] is paid. then the workers would own it, the sane rich would presumably stop trying so hard to kill it (i can’t account for the evil rich).
i don’t think SS got quite the benefit from deaths to covid that medicare got. the people on meicare who died were “high users” of medicare benefits. SS is paid according to what you paid in, not according to “how much you use.”
notso many paid in and did not use it as you suppose. in any case, SS is insurane against getting too old to work without enough money. many pay into fire insurance and car insurance and never draw from it. I am sure they would not rather have had the fire or the car accident.
Coberly:
This is just like aliens who give a fake SS number and never collect. The credit still goes to SS even though the treasury disposes of it (Modern Monetary Theory) as stated over at another site. The money does not exist anymore and our funds deposited each pay period are credited to a large SS Account. You were right. It was just the prime instigator was having none of it from you. If a person dies from SS, you have their funds to split. Eventually someone will pop up with an answer.
Run
I don’t know for sure, but this is how I think it works. The money paid by people who will never collect just goes into the Trust Fund [it’s all accounting, they don’t keep the cash in drawers breeding in the dark] like the money paid in by people who will collect…we never know who is which until they are.
The money that is in the Trust Fund (still “accounting”) is turned into cash when it is paid out to a living retiree. The total amount of money that can be paid out is determined by the amount that is in the Trust Fund or is being paid in daily (monthly?) from the payroll tax. That money is allocated to beneficiaries according to a formula that gives them a return on their money which is always more than they paid in and usually as much more as they would have gotten from a fair interest rate, as from a bank..including the change in value due to inflation. This happens automatically by “pay as you go” financing. No mystery, no under the table shenanigans, though some people seem to have a hard time understanding it. Even the Great Big Looming Unfunded Deficit will allow SS to pay out more than the workers paid in, in real dollars, as Professor Rosser pointed out, just not as much as it would be able to pay if the tax was raised as it should be, allowing future workers to have benefits commensurate (not equal) with what they paid in, and a living standard not less than they had while working..if you adjust for the fact that retirees are not usually supporting kids or still paying a mortgage…if they don’t have any other savings.
in other words, don’t look for cash in the drawers, it’s all accounting, but it changes back into real money when the retirees spend it. the accounts of people who died early, or never existed, probably stay on the books, but the actuaries and the accountants know how to allocate the money to living people and the dead or non existent people will never miss what they paid in. neither will their kids. but that’s another long story. thing is, SS does what it is supposed to do, and that is more important than what someone thinks it should do who still is mad about her sister getting the biggest piece of burfday cake.
Start raising funds immediately for urgent, acute or chronic healthcare needs. With CoCoPay
(Looks like this could work.)
After all, it looks like Medicare is intended just for those receiving Social Security benefits, including Soc Sec Disability Insurance.
SSDI
I can’t see why you think it would work.
apparently [i am no expert on this] you can get part A [hospital insurance] Medicare if you are 65 and have paid the Medicare tax for at least 10 years. you do not have to be receiving Social Security benefits.
To get Part B [doctor visits] you need to have part A AND pay 170 dollars per month, but there are fussy litte details that change this.
I think that this is a stupid way to manage insurance for dr visits. the whole point of Medicare is you pay for it over time, while you have income, before you need it with a lower premium that you would have to pay if you waited until you were older and had higher risk of needing it, and might not have enough income to pay for it.
To make it “medicare for all” (eligible at any age) you would have to pay roughly twice the premium (payroll tax) that you are paying today…but you would pay a lot less than you pay for private insurance. So I guess it’s not for people who are too stupid to understand this and scream about higher taxes while not having to pay for private insurance. or who expect someone else to pay for their medical care. or can’t figure out a way to control the prices that medicare now pays private providers.
my best guess so far is that you would need to take Medicare [and Social Security] out of the hands of Congress [okay that can’t ultimately happen…but far enough removed from Congress day to day…protected by constitutional amendment, or just by creating a special agency that would be smart enough to keep the peoople informed of what they are getting for their money and lobby against attempts by congress to change it, this agency would have a mandate to control prices..by negotiating with providers, if not replacing private providers with government clinics. at least some government clinics which would not “compete” with private providers with the advantage of a government subsidy…but merely with worker-paid efficiencies and market leverage from size.]
i did not mention Medicare Advantage because we have already seen how that “public-private” enterprise becomes corrupt.
just so we know, the current medicare ta is 1.45% for the worker, matched by his employer.
doubling it would lead to a medicare tax of about 3%, add in the employers share and compare that to what your private insurance cost you [and your employer] and keep in mind your private insurance premium will rise steeply as you get older. then there are lots of details to argue about, but they are mostly of the burfday cake kind.
Coberly
When they talk of Medicare for all, they speak of the benefits being the same as commercial insurance and far less costly administratively and the care also. Four does of Rituxan for me was $20 for two lunches while I sat there for 3 hours. List For a dose is ~$30,000 at U om University hospital in Ann Arbor. The outpatient care unit for intravenous was paid ~$8,000 per dose.
When this hits me I pack a bag and go to the ER, tell them what I suffer from and they put me in a room in back till I am admitted. There is cost there also. Not contagious but I can bleed out if injured. If my platelets start to come back, I am released and sent to inpatient care for intravenous.
Medicare is less costly. I am not sure what the cost for family care would be, At, $170/month times 4 in a family, it is costly. Then there is Supplemental and drug insurance. When people talk about Medicare Advantage, it is paid a premium. MA over codes. The latest MEDCAP report said Medicare Advantage was overpaid by $12 Billion in the latest yearly report. I have written on these overpayments too.
Everyone who has worked their 40 covered quarters has a claim on social security funds, but nowhere does it say you have to file a claim on them. Eventually those funds will be paid out to someone, just not the person whose earnings put them in the fund.
That is true for undocumented workers with fake SSN’s, typos in data entry giving bum SSN’s to real people who didn’t get corrected, ordinary workers who die before collecting, and even the diehards who never applied for benefits because socialism. Probably other cases too. If no claim is filed, no money is paid out. If the only claim is for the death benefit, someone gets $255.
If you overpay your income tax, they don’t send you a refund unless you file and ask for it. Same with SS taxes. If you over pay in one year (not so common now as when I was working) because you worked for two employers, you have to put that on your tax return to claim the money back. I don’t know what happens to the employer portion of the overpaid tax, but I would expect it just stays in the fund.
Jane E
good question. i think the employer share stays in the fund and is eventually paid out [marked bills, you know] in benefits…which i tried to explain above. but the answer would answer the age od question of “whose money is it really?] answer is that it is yours as soon as the employer pays it, same as all compensation. just that in the case of SS and medicare the gov requires him to pay it. you can guess how much of it you would see if the employer was not required to pay it, whatever nine new york economists say.
not sure right now, but all i can think is that the only way you can overpay is to make over the cap in total. i would imagine theemployer cannot overpay because he pays up to the cap on his payroll.
just for the record (my permanent record) i worry about people who worry about things like this. it’s bit too much like demanding that that burfday cake piece get weighed to the milligram. you pay into the system a reasonable amount for the benefit you will receive and there is no sane way to parse out exactly what you “should have” paid or should have got in benefits. falll off a ladder and you will get a lot more than you paid in, and everyone else will get a milligram less than they would have gotten, they all still get more than they paid in]..is that fair?
Jane E
your comment above is correct, but I try to avoid language that sounds like someone else is paying for your benefits, or that you are paying for someone else’s.
people get confused about this and always seem to imagine they are being robbed by the old, and when, to their surprise, they get old they think their benefits are welfare and they are robbing their children.
if you painted your dollars red, it would be possible you might someday see some old codger paying for his groceries with “your” red dollars. but that would be true even if you used your red dollars to pay the plumber (instead of FICA)…someday somewhere someone would be buying his cocaine with your red dollars. does that mean you are paying for his cocaine? cash is for convenience. truth is in the accounting.