When we make decisions in life they are all “motivated” by what we want the outcome to be. “Motives” can make people or systems do horrendous acts at times. This I believe goes to government and its medical establishments motives to not actually cure illness in people. Cures for things like cancer could be put on hold indefinitely so people are unable to live a long life. It’s pretty obvious the medical establishment pushed their COVID vaccine knowing the harms it would create. The whole covid response changed my mind to not trust what the government was doing. Harming Medicare will be another big step to reducing population.
Vaccines that harm reproductive abilities in women can stunt population growth, aside from killing people and children. Isn’t it amazing that people like Bill Gates that would love to see the population of the world drastically reduced, takes a huge role in spreading his money making vaccines all over the world.
It’s time that people must begin advocating for themselves and their loved ones. What motivates this government and the one world order may not be in you or your families best interest at all!
Well said! I also do not trust the medical establishment any longer. No more “vaccines” for me. Now everyone I know is injecting themselves with GLP 1’s. Sure, it’s great to drop those unwanted 45, 60, 85 lbs but what are they actually doing to peoples health in the long run?! Another Covid shot scenario in my book. Trust big Pharma? Nope, never again.
My financial guy wants me to wait to take SS. Get the max benefit. Well in 3 years what will remain of those benefits?! It’s anyone’s guess….. I need coffee!
Ironically, if we had at least partially privatized SS back when Bush proposed it, we wouldn't have any of these problems, and SS would probably be MAKING money, somehow!
But, then, the bezos post and all other liberal pubs and demoncrat politicians were screaming, "Bush wants to put us at the mercy of evil corporate America!! He wants to make us victims of the rapacious Wall Street!!"
Not mentioned here is Medicaid which I assume the fed portion comes in part or all from Medicare, particularly after passage of the ACA, and it is rife with fraud. So yes if fraud was eliminated one headline I read today suggests it would double its life expectancy
Yaaaaaaa, and add to that the fraud, and that social security bennies were handed to illegally imported people who never paid into the system, because they were slated as voter replacement..
And
We need to face the reality that the COVID management was also to relieve pressure on the already spent social security and medicare programs, as well as pensions elsewhere in the world. That wiped out a lot of beneficiary years. And it will be done again and again, because the planners will never achieve the conditions that they want.
I pulled out my calculator back when they started loading those COVID infected patients into the nursing homes.
Any elderly person waiting until 70 to get "full" bennies needs to redo their math.
In 1977 I attended the noon meeting of the Ripon Rotary Club at which William Steiger was the guest speaker. He was a well-known and popular Republican Congressman. Ripon WI is the birthplace of the Republican Party. During the Q&A I asked the good congressman about the SS system and its viability for my generation (I was 28 at the time and starting a new business). Could the government just let us invest the money in a private program? After a quick survey of the room to be sure no press was attending, Steiger replied in so many words that I was not to worry my pretty little head, Social Security was going to be around for-e-VER. I'm now 77 and collecting SS. For me, he was right. I paid the SS tax for my entire working career. But I also saved and invested like nobody's business and am now a member of the group the WP thinks shouldn't get the stipend. Screw them. Friggin' democrats.
Sure Washington Post, let’s start with the nearly 1 in 5 members of Congress aged 70 or above. I wonder what Nancy and Bernie would say when the editorial board comes to them and wants to dip into their pockets. Actually, I don’t wonder at all.
This is a hot topic for me because I'm in the middle. Let me give you a bit of insider perspective.
Twenty nine years ago I read an article that predicted that SS would go bankrupt by 2015. This was based on two conditions - one - the Boomers would be in retirement age and - two - the government saw that SS money sitting in surplus and voted to be able to dip into it.
In 2017 I turned 70 and filed for SS. Every year since then my monthly allotment has diminished because the first scoop off the top is to pay Medicare. Okay so I did the right thing and bought supplemental insurance. I have the whole alphabet. But I've been healthy and didn't need to use my Medicare benefit until May of 2022 when I had to have a tribeculectomy in my left eye to save it from glaucoma.
The doctor told me the cost would be $2500. But when I got the summary from Medicare in order for him to get the $2500 he would normally bill he charged $85,000. That is not a misprint - which I thought it was.
Then, in January 2025 I fell and broke my left femur and had to take my first ambulance ride to the hospital and surgery the next day. When I got my summary bill from Medicare the hospital bill, not including all the other services rendered was $111,000. Medicare paid $14,000. I don't even know what the supplemental insurance paid.
The conclusion is what I call action/reaction. Medicare pays what it wants to so the medical services over charge to get close to what they want.
It is a mess and probably why then gov Cuomo sent covid infected patients to nursing homes to help thin the medicaid rolls.
Fraud, and ridiculous pricing schemes. In this modern age of electronic inovation, why should C pap machines cost hundreds of dollars? And hearing aids many thousand dollars? The list is endless. Get government out of the way and prices will drop like a rock. Just fund essential care and remove the vast network of grifters making a fortune on government largesse
Money is fungible. Perhaps, in a very real sense, so is American Citizenship. The benefits belong to Americans. If there are inequities, they are rooted in misapprehension, or, the individual differences in the biology of the citizen and the income tax code designed to discriminate against the human person unevenly, punitively, and capriciously by fiat of the greed and envy driving legislative politics.
This, I suspect, is why the founders saw the excise tax as the only just and rational means of taxation to fund the government of a republic and preserve individual liberty from the predations of the stereotypical personalities that crave power over others.
I did a deep dive with GROK in re the state of Colorado, asking the total value of interstate and international commerce outbound (in USD) from the state for FY2024: >$20 Trillion. Then I asked for the total tax revenue generated for FY2024 assessed retail sales, property tax and state income tax: >$33 Billion. If a 10% excise tax were to be used instead on outbound commerce, that's a differential increase of ~$1.67 Trillion in revenue with a massive liberation of productivity and productivity quality for the residents of Colorado, who get major swathes of their private life back and a general decriminalization of their relationship to their state government.
I think the dynamic in play illuminates why Trump contemplates a similar thing on the national and federal level. The numbers stated are too fluid and complex to hold true in reality, but the differential is immutably on display. How we fund our nation's governments today is brutish, schizoid and sadistically unproductive.
A Big Rethink is happening in the streets. If we can't break the grip of the corrupt political orthodoxy that has institutionalized the spectacular normalization of fraud on display in Minnesota, California and other Machine Democrat (and crony RINO) strongholds, the DSA kids will bury us with distemper and rampage while they dance in the flames of mendacity and mutual self-immolation.
Our founder's Constitution is just fine. It's the conceits and stupidities of the Victorian, Edwardian and Elizabethan Eras that need flushing down the commode of history.
Engineering still lights the way. The engineering culture of America influences all aspects of our economy to better inform and liberate our best professional practices.
Liberating our best professional practices has a way of liberating our best personal practices, and the latter is an area of societal gain desperately needed for the benefit of all.
Gates, Fauci and Collins are but three of many pernicious examples of the archetypical malignancy that infests our era and threatens our mutual future.
Well, unfortunately for the doctors in the room, it appears doctors have been ripping us off.
And while we could blame just them for what is happening today, that would be far from accurate.
It WAS our generation (wasn't it?) that pushed in higher insurance payment schemes (Medicare was started 61 years ago, on 30 July, 1965) instead of digging down to the root problem.
Most of us didn't want to admit that doctors didn't know what they were doing and so began devising clever schemes for making money by killing people very gradually.
Better options were being offered as early as 1950, and the author of that material was warning us about the problem with doctors back then, too. But only a few of us (or our parents) heeded him (I wasn't born yet). And - at the insistence of our friends the doctors - we continued to ignore his warnings as well as the work of many others pointing in a similar direction.
So now we have a problem, and the tough guys over at the Post want to blame us for it. No doubt they have their arguments a bit confused. After all, they haven't climbed on the anti-doctor bandwagon, either.
But the fact is, we are to blame. We were warned and we failed to heed the warnings. We were offered better answers and we failed to learn about them.
So now I'll probably only live to 75 rather than to 85 like my dad. But I probably won't die with multiple heart surgeries under my belt, plus a prostate removal, taking a bunch of drugs, and finally getting my appendix removed, resulting in sepsis which would kill me slowly in a hospital. I'll die of untreated cancer or something. And maybe that will serve me right.
Actually back in 1965 most docs opposed the concept,as did the AMA until the gov came up with a big enough incentive to change,their mind and that was overpricing what they would pay for elderly care. That ultimately raised the cost of all medical care,including lab and x-ray, to the point medical insurance became a necessity.
Maybe(?), if US Representatives and Senators (as well as their staff) were required to live with the same benefits as us deplorables, we’d have a more realistic and workable retirement system. Is it too late to ask for my contribution back (with reasonable interest included of course) and let me manage my own affairs?
Do away with Medicare totally. Go back to a systems of private insurance companies writing health insurance just as we do with homes cars life etc. everyone chooses the level they are willing to pay for. Make it actual insurance ( look up the definition of insurance. Medicare ain’t it) break up the companies that have bought out every doctor’s practice in America. Make all health care pricing transparent. All doctors hospitals etc must post the cost of every service. Medicare is not insurance in any sense of the word. It is a welfare program with a single payor. It is socialized medicine. The cost of health care is the highest in the world because govt pays for it with no competition. I was running a nursing home when Medicare was established. I predicted at the time that was the worse possible solution. That it would bankrupt us.
Not only did Social Security recipients pay into the fund, but so did their employers. The employers share should be seen as wages deferred.
Extracting $3 for every $1 put into the system is not sustainable!
When we make decisions in life they are all “motivated” by what we want the outcome to be. “Motives” can make people or systems do horrendous acts at times. This I believe goes to government and its medical establishments motives to not actually cure illness in people. Cures for things like cancer could be put on hold indefinitely so people are unable to live a long life. It’s pretty obvious the medical establishment pushed their COVID vaccine knowing the harms it would create. The whole covid response changed my mind to not trust what the government was doing. Harming Medicare will be another big step to reducing population.
Vaccines that harm reproductive abilities in women can stunt population growth, aside from killing people and children. Isn’t it amazing that people like Bill Gates that would love to see the population of the world drastically reduced, takes a huge role in spreading his money making vaccines all over the world.
It’s time that people must begin advocating for themselves and their loved ones. What motivates this government and the one world order may not be in you or your families best interest at all!
We should not place trust in those who regard us as livestock.
At best the bargain is to gain today's food by leaving our tomorrows under their management.
The tech titans have proven themselves not to be humane herd keepers.
Well said! I also do not trust the medical establishment any longer. No more “vaccines” for me. Now everyone I know is injecting themselves with GLP 1’s. Sure, it’s great to drop those unwanted 45, 60, 85 lbs but what are they actually doing to peoples health in the long run?! Another Covid shot scenario in my book. Trust big Pharma? Nope, never again.
My financial guy wants me to wait to take SS. Get the max benefit. Well in 3 years what will remain of those benefits?! It’s anyone’s guess….. I need coffee!
Ironically, if we had at least partially privatized SS back when Bush proposed it, we wouldn't have any of these problems, and SS would probably be MAKING money, somehow!
But, then, the bezos post and all other liberal pubs and demoncrat politicians were screaming, "Bush wants to put us at the mercy of evil corporate America!! He wants to make us victims of the rapacious Wall Street!!"
To be fair, Bezos had nothing to do with WaPo during the Bush-43 administration. He bought it is 2013.
I am so sick of being robbed. I am equally sick of being treated like a moron.
The government is wasting the money, not me.
Not mentioned here is Medicaid which I assume the fed portion comes in part or all from Medicare, particularly after passage of the ACA, and it is rife with fraud. So yes if fraud was eliminated one headline I read today suggests it would double its life expectancy
Yaaaaaaa, and add to that the fraud, and that social security bennies were handed to illegally imported people who never paid into the system, because they were slated as voter replacement..
And
We need to face the reality that the COVID management was also to relieve pressure on the already spent social security and medicare programs, as well as pensions elsewhere in the world. That wiped out a lot of beneficiary years. And it will be done again and again, because the planners will never achieve the conditions that they want.
I pulled out my calculator back when they started loading those COVID infected patients into the nursing homes.
Any elderly person waiting until 70 to get "full" bennies needs to redo their math.
In 1977 I attended the noon meeting of the Ripon Rotary Club at which William Steiger was the guest speaker. He was a well-known and popular Republican Congressman. Ripon WI is the birthplace of the Republican Party. During the Q&A I asked the good congressman about the SS system and its viability for my generation (I was 28 at the time and starting a new business). Could the government just let us invest the money in a private program? After a quick survey of the room to be sure no press was attending, Steiger replied in so many words that I was not to worry my pretty little head, Social Security was going to be around for-e-VER. I'm now 77 and collecting SS. For me, he was right. I paid the SS tax for my entire working career. But I also saved and invested like nobody's business and am now a member of the group the WP thinks shouldn't get the stipend. Screw them. Friggin' democrats.
A business. Another thing not mentioned here is that the small business man pays double, for himself as owner and for himself as employee.
Us too.
Sure Washington Post, let’s start with the nearly 1 in 5 members of Congress aged 70 or above. I wonder what Nancy and Bernie would say when the editorial board comes to them and wants to dip into their pockets. Actually, I don’t wonder at all.
I’m pretty sure the real reason is fraud and illegals
This is a hot topic for me because I'm in the middle. Let me give you a bit of insider perspective.
Twenty nine years ago I read an article that predicted that SS would go bankrupt by 2015. This was based on two conditions - one - the Boomers would be in retirement age and - two - the government saw that SS money sitting in surplus and voted to be able to dip into it.
In 2017 I turned 70 and filed for SS. Every year since then my monthly allotment has diminished because the first scoop off the top is to pay Medicare. Okay so I did the right thing and bought supplemental insurance. I have the whole alphabet. But I've been healthy and didn't need to use my Medicare benefit until May of 2022 when I had to have a tribeculectomy in my left eye to save it from glaucoma.
The doctor told me the cost would be $2500. But when I got the summary from Medicare in order for him to get the $2500 he would normally bill he charged $85,000. That is not a misprint - which I thought it was.
Then, in January 2025 I fell and broke my left femur and had to take my first ambulance ride to the hospital and surgery the next day. When I got my summary bill from Medicare the hospital bill, not including all the other services rendered was $111,000. Medicare paid $14,000. I don't even know what the supplemental insurance paid.
The conclusion is what I call action/reaction. Medicare pays what it wants to so the medical services over charge to get close to what they want.
It is a mess and probably why then gov Cuomo sent covid infected patients to nursing homes to help thin the medicaid rolls.
Why do they strive to be so disingenuous?
As always - follow the money
Fraud, and ridiculous pricing schemes. In this modern age of electronic inovation, why should C pap machines cost hundreds of dollars? And hearing aids many thousand dollars? The list is endless. Get government out of the way and prices will drop like a rock. Just fund essential care and remove the vast network of grifters making a fortune on government largesse
Money is fungible. Perhaps, in a very real sense, so is American Citizenship. The benefits belong to Americans. If there are inequities, they are rooted in misapprehension, or, the individual differences in the biology of the citizen and the income tax code designed to discriminate against the human person unevenly, punitively, and capriciously by fiat of the greed and envy driving legislative politics.
This, I suspect, is why the founders saw the excise tax as the only just and rational means of taxation to fund the government of a republic and preserve individual liberty from the predations of the stereotypical personalities that crave power over others.
I did a deep dive with GROK in re the state of Colorado, asking the total value of interstate and international commerce outbound (in USD) from the state for FY2024: >$20 Trillion. Then I asked for the total tax revenue generated for FY2024 assessed retail sales, property tax and state income tax: >$33 Billion. If a 10% excise tax were to be used instead on outbound commerce, that's a differential increase of ~$1.67 Trillion in revenue with a massive liberation of productivity and productivity quality for the residents of Colorado, who get major swathes of their private life back and a general decriminalization of their relationship to their state government.
I think the dynamic in play illuminates why Trump contemplates a similar thing on the national and federal level. The numbers stated are too fluid and complex to hold true in reality, but the differential is immutably on display. How we fund our nation's governments today is brutish, schizoid and sadistically unproductive.
A Big Rethink is happening in the streets. If we can't break the grip of the corrupt political orthodoxy that has institutionalized the spectacular normalization of fraud on display in Minnesota, California and other Machine Democrat (and crony RINO) strongholds, the DSA kids will bury us with distemper and rampage while they dance in the flames of mendacity and mutual self-immolation.
Our founder's Constitution is just fine. It's the conceits and stupidities of the Victorian, Edwardian and Elizabethan Eras that need flushing down the commode of history.
Engineering still lights the way. The engineering culture of America influences all aspects of our economy to better inform and liberate our best professional practices.
Liberating our best professional practices has a way of liberating our best personal practices, and the latter is an area of societal gain desperately needed for the benefit of all.
Gates, Fauci and Collins are but three of many pernicious examples of the archetypical malignancy that infests our era and threatens our mutual future.
Well, unfortunately for the doctors in the room, it appears doctors have been ripping us off.
And while we could blame just them for what is happening today, that would be far from accurate.
It WAS our generation (wasn't it?) that pushed in higher insurance payment schemes (Medicare was started 61 years ago, on 30 July, 1965) instead of digging down to the root problem.
Most of us didn't want to admit that doctors didn't know what they were doing and so began devising clever schemes for making money by killing people very gradually.
Better options were being offered as early as 1950, and the author of that material was warning us about the problem with doctors back then, too. But only a few of us (or our parents) heeded him (I wasn't born yet). And - at the insistence of our friends the doctors - we continued to ignore his warnings as well as the work of many others pointing in a similar direction.
So now we have a problem, and the tough guys over at the Post want to blame us for it. No doubt they have their arguments a bit confused. After all, they haven't climbed on the anti-doctor bandwagon, either.
But the fact is, we are to blame. We were warned and we failed to heed the warnings. We were offered better answers and we failed to learn about them.
So now I'll probably only live to 75 rather than to 85 like my dad. But I probably won't die with multiple heart surgeries under my belt, plus a prostate removal, taking a bunch of drugs, and finally getting my appendix removed, resulting in sepsis which would kill me slowly in a hospital. I'll die of untreated cancer or something. And maybe that will serve me right.
Actually back in 1965 most docs opposed the concept,as did the AMA until the gov came up with a big enough incentive to change,their mind and that was overpricing what they would pay for elderly care. That ultimately raised the cost of all medical care,including lab and x-ray, to the point medical insurance became a necessity.
Maybe(?), if US Representatives and Senators (as well as their staff) were required to live with the same benefits as us deplorables, we’d have a more realistic and workable retirement system. Is it too late to ask for my contribution back (with reasonable interest included of course) and let me manage my own affairs?
Do away with Medicare totally. Go back to a systems of private insurance companies writing health insurance just as we do with homes cars life etc. everyone chooses the level they are willing to pay for. Make it actual insurance ( look up the definition of insurance. Medicare ain’t it) break up the companies that have bought out every doctor’s practice in America. Make all health care pricing transparent. All doctors hospitals etc must post the cost of every service. Medicare is not insurance in any sense of the word. It is a welfare program with a single payor. It is socialized medicine. The cost of health care is the highest in the world because govt pays for it with no competition. I was running a nursing home when Medicare was established. I predicted at the time that was the worse possible solution. That it would bankrupt us.
💯
As I posted earlier,we did not need health insjrance until Medicare was passed. Until then it was a union based perk most did not require
I was running a small business. We bought private insurance. The expense was minor