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Make Medicare optional
Since Medicare was instituted a scant 44 years ago to provide medical care to those that would presumably need it the most, the elderly, the percentage of persons living to its eligible age of 65 has exploded in size. Now, with the vanguard of the baby boom generation reaching that age in less than two years, one questions why they should be required to go on this governmental health care plan if they were on an acceptable one already.
Like myself, many older taxpaying Americans have paid into Medicare since its inception in 1966, even though millions already had private health care coverage from our employers. Previously, our private plans would continue into retirement until our deaths.
Then, when these companies saw a chance to shed their obligations, they used this new governmental system as an excuse to "bail out" of their responsibilities to their now nonproductive retirees.
Since the president has reassured the country that all those that already have private health care will be allowed to remain in their plans if national health care is adopted, why not also allow the millions of unionized workers in private industry plus most governmental workers to remain with their plans for life, without having to ever enroll in Medicare or the new national system, thereby relieving those systems of billions of dollars of unnecessary medical debt? The monies that were collected from those individuals for future Medicare could be slowly repaid by giving them a yearly tax credit, which would continue until it was fully refunded or the recipient died, whichever came first, at which time any unpaid monies would be lost.
Like Social Security, which was the first U.S. socialized system, Medicare has always been a crapshoot as to whether one would actually live to see a benefit on their contributions. To many Americans who were not fortunate enough to have supplemented health care during their working lifetimes, it was a blessing in their golden years. To those that did have that benefit, Medicare could be seen as an unnecessary infringement on their already established medical plans.
President Obama should seek to pass a law requiring all existing health care insurance providers to return to the pre-Medicare-days policy of insuring their recipients for life, thereby eliminating this program for those presently insured from other sources.
Ronald Gendron
Smithtown
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December 10, 2009
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| 1858: Rudolf Diesel, German engineer who designed the compression-ignition engine. |
| 1869: Neville Chamberlin, British Prime Minister (1937-40). |
| 1893: Wilfred Owen, World War I poet. |
| 1932: John Updike, American poet and novelist. |
| 1936: Frederik W. deKlerk, President of the Republic of South Africa. |
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