Our nation’s entitlement programs are broken and going bankrupt. Medicare for the first time has reached a negative cash flow which means that receipts of payments from taxes do not cover the cost of expenses and money must be taken out of the general trust to cover the costs. The trustees of the Medicare account are predicting that it will be completely exhausted by 2019. Social Security, while a little more stable, is on the same road as Medicare and is projected to exhaust itself as well by 2041 — thanks to an aging population and a dwindling pool of workers to fund the program. All in all it’s not a good prognosis for government welfare programs for the younger generations of Americans.
An expansion in the Medicare and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to include more Americans has the potential to continually make private healthcare more expensive. It’s already bad enough as federal and state governments mandate private insurers cover everything under the sun regardless of condition or age, but having a competing government program that everyone shares in the cost for will price out the insurance companies and make it impossible for small businesses to offer private health plans to their employees.
The best solution to the current health care problem is to take the government out of the system and let the free market correct itself. Let the insurance companies offer custom policies to people based on age and condition and reduce the government benefits program to cover only the very most and truly needy Americans. Let private citizens make their own decision about how they handle health care, whether through insurance or a health savings account. The options are out there, and the free market has the ability to cover itself.
Social Security is failing, and by the time most of today’s college students begin to think about retirement the pension program will have been exhausted. As Alan Greenspan noted in a congressional hearing, the government can guarantee they’ll print the money but not necessarily the value of the payments — which is a scary thought. President Bush’s idea to privatize the system may have been one of the most innovative of his presidency, but it was quashed by the special interests and entrenched opposition. Unfortunately, the people who would have benefited the most (college students) traditionally are the least active in the political realm.
As Clinton and Obama continue slugging it out for the Democratic nomination, remember that their solutions to the problem are to raise taxes and increase benefits. They’ll dress it up and make all sorts of promises about fixing the welfare system with all new free programs – but these programs cost money and will ultimately lead to an increasingly dependent state that moves away from the independent American mentality. With these two candidates I’m afraid that the old adage that Democracy will fail when voters learn to vote people into office that will promise the most largesse from the public treasury may come true.
E-mail Benton at [email protected]
