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It doesn't take a genius to figure out the problem with Federal spending. Medicare & Medicaid + Social Security + Defense Department make up the vast majority of spending. Now if you look at the sources of income you can see percentage wise, Social Security pretty much pays for itself. Despite the recession, income tax still pulls its weight.So you have two choices: you can become more of a socialist country and increase the income, or you can rely on the individual to pay his/her own way in life. That doesn't mean we can't have a safety net of social programs so we don't have every poor person diving into dumpsters for food or dying in culverts under the street from a common illness. I think Ryan is looking in one of the right places to make cuts, but simply cutting benefits is not a great answer. In my mind it is the ultra-modern technology (and the companies that make the high-tech equipment and designer drugs) that need to be cut. You can't get mid-grade medical treatment in American hospitals, that's malpractice. My mother died in a hospital watching a large screen TV and had about 5 computer-like devices to monitor everything and pump fluids in and out. Medicare (read tax-payers/borrowed money) picked up 100% of the cost because she was poor as a church mouse. The only technology she had at home was an old b/w TV. She would have been just as happy - and just as dead - with 1960's technology where the nurses pump a rubber bulb to take your blood pressure.The cost/benefit ration is far too heavily tilted on the side of COST in modern medicine. The government could probably save the $5.8 trillion if they just passed a law that gave patients a choice about what grade of medical care they wanted and had hospitals that met that need. Oh, and the Right to Die should be an individual's personal freedom. When all the pleasure is gone from my life and ain't never comin' back because I am never going to get healthy, I want the right to say, "Give me the arsenic"
It doesn't take a genius to figure out the problem with Federal spending. Medicare & Medicaid + Social Security + Defense Department make up the vast majority of spending. Now if you look at the sources of income you can see percentage wise, Social Security pretty much pays for itself. Despite the recession, income tax still pulls its weight.
So you have two choices: you can become more of a socialist country and increase the income, or you can rely on the individual to pay his/her own way in life. That doesn't mean we can't have a safety net of social programs so we don't have every poor person diving into dumpsters for food or dying in culverts under the street from a common illness.
I think Ryan is looking in one of the right places to make cuts, but simply cutting benefits is not a great answer. In my mind it is the ultra-modern technology (and the companies that make the high-tech equipment and designer drugs) that need to be cut. You can't get mid-grade medical treatment in American hospitals, that's malpractice. My mother died in a hospital watching a large screen TV and had about 5 computer-like devices to monitor everything and pump fluids in and out. Medicare (read tax-payers/borrowed money) picked up 100% of the cost because she was poor as a church mouse. The only technology she had at home was an old b/w TV. She would have been just as happy - and just as dead - with 1960's technology where the nurses pump a rubber bulb to take your blood pressure.
The cost/benefit ration is far too heavily tilted on the side of COST in modern medicine. The government could probably save the $5.8 trillion if they just passed a law that gave patients a choice about what grade of medical care they wanted and had hospitals that met that need. Oh, and the Right to Die should be an individual's personal freedom. When all the pleasure is gone from my life and ain't never comin' back because I am never going to get healthy, I want the right to say, "Give me the arsenic"
