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For most of my life I paid 1.45% in medicare tax and figuring an average income from 1985 of say $60,000 that's $60,000*35*.0145=$30,450 that I paid in for Medicare taxes.
That will get you about a 1-night stay in the hospital for a simple procedure. Maybe (I doubt it) it will be enough for a kidney stone, maybe a torn ACL, perhaps appendicitis. Or maybe a couple months of your Cholesterol Medication.
Everything else, you didn't pay for. Does that make it free?
To OP and others. Don't focus on what it's called, focus on what it accomplishes. If we can get "medicare-like" coverage for all, it is either good or bad for us as a nation. Being a jealous twit because someone else is getting something you had to pay for is juvenile. If (and I realize this is up for debate), it is in the interest of our country, then let it happen. If it is not, then propose something else.
Guess I'm in a bad mood today. I just hate seeing all this "I got mine, *********" mentality, which seems to be more prevalent every day.
The “ I paid for it” thing is another one of those Internet myths.
Remember Paul Ryan’s plan to move Medicare to a voucher system that sort of got some traction during the Romney campaign?
His plan was to give seniors vouchers to buy private healthcare insurance and/ or services and be done with it.
It was a use it or lose it thing.
Private insurers want nothing to do with being the PRIMARY insurers of elderly healthcare risks which is why Medicare was created, 55 years ago. There was also the issue of “ now what” , when ongoing premium or service costs exceeded the remaining value of the vouchers.
I remember touring one when my father was at the end of his life.
The administrator told me that "90% of her people" were on Medicaid.
Deadbeats? Just like Team Red claims?
No, average folks who worked 30 to 40 years in the mills/factories of the Rust Belt. The same union Dems who turned to Trump in 2016.
After their 100 days of Medicare were up they then went to their private long term insurance plans. After they exhausted those it was on to the next phase: liquidating their assets/monies accumulated over the past 30-40 years.
Well, when a bottle of aspirin in a nursing home costs $300 even though across the street at Rite Aid it goes for $3 things get out of hand real quick.
Some are destitute and qualify for Medicaid after a year. Others last three. The real non-deadbeats last five or six...according to the administrator.
All to live with chronic pain, Alzheimer's, dementia, and other diminished cognitive conditions. What a lovely way to exit this hellhole.
She told me that most of the kids don't even tell the parents that everything they worked for over their entire lives is gone. If the spouse is still living the government can't touch the house so there's your silver lining. But it's only a matter of time.
The adult kids don't tell the elderly parents, according to her, because the Silent Generation and the Greatest Generation believed charity was for the weak and Medicaid was for lowlife bums.
Well congrats. I don't know how old you are but you've bought the same false paradigm as they did.
Truth is we have no proper health care when it comes to end of life in this country. You'll all be on Medicaid if you live long enough or the aspirin goes up to $600. The rich are only immune as far their money goes which it does...for the most part now. Lucky them. They get to be robbed of more total dollars if they can manage to hang on for one more day.
All for the glorious socialized health care system both teams have propped up and done nothing to fix. Well, "fix" is relative. Them being involved in the first place is what started this mess (with them creating Medicare and Medicaid).
That is only fair. Why should "we the people" have to pay for their upkeep and allow them to keep their estate to transfer to family?
SCOTUS also found that no one has a contractual right to receive Social Security benefits, even though they've paid SS tax for decades. It can be completely withdrawn at any time with no recourse. Why? There's no Constitutional mandate to provide SS benefits to anyone. Flemming v. Nestor
SS is primarily Old Age Income Insurance.
The point is that SCOTUS ruled that SS was not in conflict with the 10th.
Decades latter, SCOTUS also ruled that Congress could change or eliminate benefits and not owe a dime to people and employers who paid payroll taxes.
The idiots proposing the Medicare for all giveaway just to buy votes, don't understand the fact that there just isn't enough OTHER PEOPLES MONEY to go around
You are talking trillions of dollars in costs and even if the crazy politicians went in and took every dollar that the billionaires and millionaires have, it just won't cover the cost.
That leaves us to pay for their dumba$$ ideas
It’s DOA in Congress no matter the party in majority.
Trump ran on campaign promises to” replace Obamacare with something wonderful that was going to take care of everybody and government was going to pay for it” He said it to buy votes, too.
Trump had no plan or projected costs and ignored requests for more information.
There is no daylight between what Trump pitched and the Medicare for All thing.
They already had one. It was called the "Public Option" and Barry Soetoro helped kill it back in 2010.
Don't hold your breath (anybody)
Had one?
In 2009, the House passed several bills by thin margins, to provide a “ public option” it did not survive the Senate. Moderate Democrats and most Republicans opposed the “ public option”. The WH withdrew support and was unwilling to bet the farm on it.
Had the WH not withdrawn it’s support, it is unlikely there would have been enough votes to pass the ACA. It is understood than many people would not have viewed this as a loss. Apparently, the detractors were cool with allowing insurers to :
Discriminate on the basis of preexisting conditions, and
Sell plans with major exclusions, low annual caps on claims, no caps on annual out of pockets and no caps on increases to annual premiums.
Once passed, Republicans voted to repeal the ACA more than 100x to no avail.
Obama made clear he would support any legislation that continued to provide the same benefits as lower costs to consumers.
Trump changed the narrative and made clear repeal and replace had to be simultaneous and include preexisting conditions.
Leading to the 2018 midterms, nearly every Republican running for election made crystal clear they supported a mandate for the inclusion of preexisting conditions and did so despite nearly 8 years of trying to allow insurers to once again discriminate.
Congress could have spent this time improving the ACA instead of trying to throw the baby out with the bath water.
( while I am an advocate for Universal HC- not so much for Single Payer.
30+ other 1st world countries manages to do it... while spending half of what the US currently doing now. With better or equal results.
Why is the US sooooo inept compared to those 30+ countries with 600+ million inhabitants?
Medicare for all would save the US $1-2 Trillion each year!!!
No two countries with Universal HC use the same strategy of delivery.
No country uses a strategy similar to what Bernie and Warren are pitching.
What works in a country with a fraction of the US population may not have similar outcomes in the US. We are not nearly as risk adverse, substantially fatter, less healthy, more violent and more addicted to substances than other developed countries.
Medicaid is for deadbeats and the proposed program should be labeled as such.
Children on Medicaid are spawn of deadbeats and face an almost certain deadbeat future being raised to believe they have no control over their destiny. Oh, and it’s also much much easier to be lazy trash when nobody is holding you accountable.
Keep us posed as you become the primary caregiver of your elderly, disabled, demented, incontinent parents.
Add the illegals that the democrats want to add to medicare and they will not pay there bills.. costs go up.
Well a few do. Few does not equal most or all.
That has not gone over well.
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last five or six...according to the administrator. 
