Medicare is fundamentally sound
To the editor:
I recently read the guest commentary by Sally C. Pipes, “Medicare Doomsday Clock ticks toward midnight,” published in the Aug. 7, 2024, Island Reporter and I was disgusted. Using the word “doomsday” is a scare tactic intended to alarm seniors. She also uses the term “Ponzi scheme,” which also is inflammatory and inaccurate. Medicare has worked well for patients and doctors for 59 years and will continue to do so.
Ms. Pipes correctly points out that in 2023 Medicare had a shortfall of $12 billion. That sounds like a lot, until you do a little research and learn that the total Medicare budget is $821 billion, something she failed to mention in her guest commentary. This is deliberately misleading.
If you do the math, Medicare in 2023 was 98.5% funded by the tax revenue it took in. In other words, the shortfall only represented 1.5% of total revenue. Medicare is not going to go broke. Some reforms are needed, but the system is stable. Additionally, economists have noted that, after years of steady increases, annual spending per beneficiary has leveled off in recent years, something the author fails to mention.
Of course, we should strive to continually reform Medicare, and we should try to root out fraud, waste and abuse. For instance, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that home health nurses were generating multi-thousand dollar bills on a single home health visit by padding the patients’ diagnoses lists. The total cost of these? About $15 billion. We always have room for improvement.
And if you see a name brand drug advertised on TV, you can be sure it is expensive. The costs run into the thousands, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands per year. So there is fat there that can be trimmed. But we don’t have to blow up the system to do it.
Ms. Pipes has never been to medical school, never cared for patients and doesn’t talk to dozens of Medicare patients every day as I and my fellow Lee County physicians do. She did not attend medical school, nor did she earn a Ph.D. in economics as far as I can tell. She holds only an honorary degree from Pepperdine.
Ms. Pipes told us the sky was falling in the 2010s in her numerous treatises on the evils of Obamacare. She claimed that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would somehow ration care. In fact, it has done the opposite. It’s given affordable health insurance to millions of working adults. These are people with too much income to qualify for Medicaid, but who don’t earn enough to pay the $1,000 monthly premiums for conventional health insurance. The ACA has kept people healthy. And it has allowed entrepreneurial folks to leave their large employer (and its health insurance) and to go out and open a small business. People aren’t necessarily stuck in their jobs because they want to keep their health insurance. This is good for the economy. Furthermore, self-employed folks are able to get coverage and not worry about going bankrupt if they get sick and need hospitalization. Her doom and gloom predictions were wrong then, and they are wrong now.
The sky is not falling. Medicare may need some continual tweaks, but fundamentally the system is sound.
Dr. Scott Crater
Fort Myers