If you have ever had to purchase individual health insurance you know exactly how insane Paul Ryan’s senior health insurance vouchers are. If you haven’t then you might want to read a post I wrote in November 2008.
Fact: Individual health insurance is only cost competitive if you’re young and healthy, because health insurance has nothing to do with health care and everything to do with risk assessment.
So… which insurance companies are going to insure our older citizens? Perhaps they’ll simply take them – and their vouchers – for a year, then raise their rates and watch as seniors drop out. Frankly, I’m having trouble seeing them take them at all. Seriously, why would a business based solely on assessing risk take on the riskiest demographic in this country? It’s bad business, and one of the driving forces as to why Medicare came into existence.
Which brings us back to Paul Ryan’s plan for future seniors and what it really means to everyone. Via Gooznews in a post entitled “Attention Future Seniors: Republican Plan A 100% Estate Tax”
So here’s the real argument young and middle-aged people need to hear, and the real reason why the “more skin in the game” argument can never work for seniors or other vulnerable populations, including them when they reach that age. Seniors and the poor account for over half of health care spending. Within those groups, 5 percent of the population accounts for 50 percent of health care costs; and 20 percent of the population accounts for about 80 percent. These costs come for the most part at times when economic incentives have no influence at all on medical decision-making: in medical crises; in treating chronic conditions; and, for most Medicare patients, in the last six months of life.
That’s why a voucher program for Medicare, which will shift an increasing share of those inevitable costs onto the elderly themselves, can fairly be categorized as a 100 percent estate tax or death tax. People under 55 need to know that if the plan crafted by Rep. Paul Ryan were passed, most of them will never have a cent to leave to their children. It will all go to the health care industry to support the American way of dying.
In the end, the Republican plan is a death/estate tax. It is a plan that will bankrupt the majority of Americans and lays waste to the GOP cries over their freedom loving right to be able to leave their hard earned dollars to their children. In many cases, children will be trying to help their parents make up the difference between the voucher and the actual cost of care, which, in turn, will leave them less prepared for their own golden years. In many other cases, no one will be able to help the senior, which has led me to start calling the Republican plan the Bring Out Your Dead! plan. (h/t Monty Python)