Promise, promises….a lot was promised to gain your vote, but what now….will it be or will it not?

Medicare has never been a fully public program. A considerable portion of the medical bills has always been paid by the beneficiaries. In fact, on average, retirees over 65 years old are paying more out of their pockets today than they did prior to the passage of Medicare in 1965.

When the Medicare program was signed into law in 1964, Congress set a mandatory premium for physician care called Part B. They also required Medicare recipients to pay an ever growing portion of the overall cost of the hospitalization invoice. This can amount to 20 percent of their medical bills. At the time the bill was up for a vote, Democrats stated that this condition was necessary in order for it to pass. Lobbyists for the American Medical Association (AMA), the insurance carriers, drug companies and most of the rest of corporate America fought the passage of Medicare and Medicaid. The Republican Party was the voice off those interests. These concessions reduced this opposition, but the final product kept the carriers and the drug monopolies in a position to do the dirty work they have been doing ever since.

One of the results of this compromise has been that Medicare Part B premium requirements have grown each year. The premium, now over $100 a month, is automatically taken out of monthly Social Security checks.

Even with Medicare, there is something like a 20 percent or more “gap” in coverage for recipients. To help cover the “gap,” insurance companies sell so-called Medigap insurance, which has become a major source of revenue for private insurance companies. The dollar value for insurance companies of this gap has steadily grown to an astronomical figure, in the billions each year.

Following the failure to win a universal health care program in the early 1990s, the insurance companies created a new scheme and quickly obtained federal approval for it. Congressional Republicans, assisted by the Clinton administration, devised a new way to satisfy the greed of the insurance companies through health maintenance organizations, or HMOs. HMOs were originally group practices, like the Kaiser programs, set up by well-meaning preventive medicine professionals.
The HMOs of the 1990s were a whole new animal created by insurance companies to “offer retirees a deal.” The deal was simple. Sign up with us, we’ll pay for the gap, and we’ll give you better service.

It sounded like a good plan, but corruption was rampant. This was the heyday of corporations like Oxford Health Insurance Company and other underhanded insurance carriers who, in the late 1990s, were caught raking in premium payments but refusing to provide advertised services, while doctors and hospitals went unpaid for months and even years. After the scheme was exposed, Oxford’s CEO was given a golden parachute worth millions.

This is only the beginning…..and only the tip of a huge iceberg that could very sink a struggling economy.  I am saying …do not look for too much in the way of help right now…maybe when you are older (where have you heard that before?).