Three Ways To Save Medicare Paul Ryan Doesn’t Want You To Know About

[cal04]

http://thinkprogress.org/2011/04/30/three-ways-save-medicare/

Across the country, Main Street Americans are speaking out against a GOP budget plan that would effectively end Medicare.

In taking aim at Medicare, these conservative members of Congress are claiming that they are actually “saving Medicare” from financial ruin and that there is no possible choice other than to privatize the program and throw seniors to the insurance industry. They say this to justify a plan that the Congressional Budget Office says would have the elderly spending the majority of their income on health care.

(snip)
ThinkProgress has assembled three different policy options that, if enacted, could help Medicare’s future financial issues and save the taxpayer billions of dollars:

1. Empower Medicare To Negotiate For Lower Drug Prices:
2. Allow Drug Reimportation From Canada:
3. Globalize Medicare:

(snip)
The primary reason these three common sense initiatives have not been enacted in the United States is because of deep opposition from the drug industry, for-profit hospitals, and other medical-industrial complex interest groups. Yet they all present simple and effective ways to lower costs and help shore up the finances of the Medicare program. If Ryan and other so-called reform advocates were serious about ensuring the fiscal solvency of the Medicare program and lowering health care costs for Americans, they would not remove these options from the debate.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

1. Admit younger, healthier people

the one thing that nobody mentions.

Balance out all those 90-year-olds with a bunch of 20-year-olds.

[Scuba]

3. Yeah, but those customers are profitable for the insurance companies. They want to keep them. n/t

[tech9413]

2. The real problem is this isn't a plan to save Medicare

Their goal is to starve it and make it ineffectual. Even if they have to do it by baby steps so that it can be made palatable to those who aren't paying enough attention.
Your three steps are a common sense means to do it, that's why they are never discussed in the main stream political discourse. None of them would be easy to achieve due to the financial and political opposition, but they are a good alternative.