The history of Medicare and Medicaid ? a history in which fraud has proliferated despite all efforts to stop it, and failure to control costs has become a national nightmare. In 1966 the cost of Medicare to the taxpayers was about $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that it would cost $12 billion, adjusted for inflation, by 1990. The actual cost in 1990 was nearly nine times that ? $107 billion. By 2009 Medicare costs reached more than $440 billion, with Medicaid boosting that by an additional $255 billion. And this doesn”t take into account the Medicaid expansion in last year”s stimulus.
The health care reform bills that emerged from the House and the Senate late last year would only exacerbate this crisis. The federal takeover of health care that those bills represent would subsume approximately one-sixth of our national economy. Combined with spending at all levels, government would then control about 50 percent of total national production.
My question to all of you is do we really want this?
Doug Carlson
Clearlake
