{"id":2007,"date":"2009-07-07T06:14:14","date_gmt":"2009-07-07T14:14:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/simonburrow.com\/\/?p=2007"},"modified":"2009-10-16T05:51:47","modified_gmt":"2009-10-16T13:51:47","slug":"scary-medicare-math","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/?p=2007","title":{"rendered":"Scary Medicare Math"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is costing the Medicare system about $500,000 to take care of my Father-in-Laws heart-hip-infection problems<\/strong><\/a> and they aren\u2019t finished yet.
\nMy friend Wally and I took that number as a starting point and did some extrapolative math.\u00a0 Which is at best scary.\u00a0 The executive summary is that every working person in America will have to pay $5000 per year for 20 years for the baby boomers end of life experience.\u00a0 Read the details here.<\/strong><\/a>
\nAnd then please tell me why I’m wrong.There are about fifty million baby boomers and we assumed about half of them will get the kind of care mentioned above.\u00a0 Why not?\u00a0 Medicare is the prepaid buffet of the medical industry.\u00a0 Once you are in the line take as much as you want there is no additional charge to you.\u00a0 So multiply five hundred thousand times fifty million divided by two and the cost for baby boomer Medicare comes about to about 12 trillion dollars. Fortunately it will be spread over about 20 years so it will only be about five hundred billion dollars a year.
\nHow do these bills get paid?\u00a0 The baby boomers will be retired so the next generation, our children, will have to pay.
\nThe question then becomes: Can the people working\u00a0 afford to pay our medical bills?\u00a0 The math will tell us.\u00a0 There are about 300 million Americans. 25% are students and not working, 25% are retired and not working and another 20% are unemployed, housewives, disabled or not working for some other reason.\u00a0 This means that about one hundred million working people are going to have to pay the baby boomers medical bill of $500 billion dollars per year.
\nDoing the long division, so you won\u2019t have to, we calculated that each working person is going to have to pay about five thousand dollars per year for the next twenty years to pay for baby boomer Medicare.
\nBut you say haven\u2019t we been saving the money they take out of our paychecks to pay for this.\u00a0 Well we have been pretending to save it.\u00a0 But in reality we have loaned it to ourselves and spent it.\u00a0 The Medicare savings account is about as real as home equity in a new home in Las Vegas.
\nThe only two solutions I can come up with are rationing, the European solution, or making the baby boomers use their own wealth to pay their medical bills.\u00a0 The first sounds statist and the second is political suicide.\u00a0 This mornings WSJ has an editorial about rationing of health care in England.<\/strong><\/a>
\nPlease tell me my numbers are wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is costing the Medicare system about $500,000 to take care of my Father-in-Laws heart-hip-infection problems and they aren\u2019t finished yet. My friend Wally and I took that number as a starting point and did some extrapolative math.\u00a0 Which is at best scary.\u00a0 The executive summary is that every working person in America will have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-care"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p99jGb-wn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2007"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2007\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2401,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2007\/revisions\/2401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}