Medicare is the worst claims denier in the country and has 36.4 trillion of liability with no money to pay for it

The following are comments by Lawrence A. Hunter., Ph.D

Social Security Institute
15 Culpeper St.
Warrenton, VA 20187

What is wrong with this picture? President Obama proposes to replicate Medicare’s infirmaries and impose them on everyone in his obsession to have the government take over a healthcare system 85 percent of the American People are satisfied with. He proposes to force private insurance companies to operate under the kind of bureaucratic constraints and incentives that makes Medicare the worst claims denier in the country.

But that’s not all. President Obama is following a cut-Medicare-first strategy to help pay for his grandiose healthcare takeover by the government. In other words, he intends to shift the costs of his new entitlement program onto the backs of senior citizens. That’s old-fashioned check kiting, paying your bills by writing checks on an overdrawn account. It’s a criminal offense when anyone but the government does it

According to a recent study by the minority staff of the congressional Joint Economic Committee, rather than applying the savings from his cut-Medicare-first strategy to reducing the Medicare Trust Fund’s $36-trillion deficit, President Obama proposes to raid those Trust-Fund savings by just over $2 trillion in present-value terms to subsidize his grandiose government take over of the rest of the healthcare system.

The false illusion that Medicare works well is perpetuated on the public, especially on senior citizens who depend on Medicare, as a result of extraordinary actions taken to avoid making old people suffer the consequences of Medicare’s bankruptcy. Doctors, insurance companies, government and other healthcare providers have historically delivered healthcare to Medicare recipients with minimum rationing by shifting a large portion of the full costs of seniors’ healthcare onto younger people and healthy seniors through higher taxes, higher insurance premiums and higher doctor, hospital, pharmaceutical, medical devices and laboratory costs. And then demagogic politicians turn around and demonize healthcare providers and insurance companies for “gouging,” “waste, fraud and abuse” and “obsession with profits.”

A rule most people learn early in life, which Members of Congress never seem to grasp, is that when you are in a hole stop digging. Congress just keeps digging the hole deeper on healthcare with its grandiose, jerry-rigged schemes to take over healthcare and turn it over to the bureaucrats to run.

The Social Security Institute (SSI) is a national, 501(c)(4) non-profit, non-partisan seniors’ advocacy organization working to promote the retirement security of today’s seniors and the seniors of tomorrow. SSI’s top policy priorities are to stop the raid on the Social Security Trust Funds, prevent cuts to Social Security and Medicare benefits, and protect seniors from health care rationing and other limitations on their access to health care.

Metric 12—Percentages of claim lines (i.e., records) denied

Description: What percentage of records submitted are denied by the payer for reasons other than a claim edit?  Medicare had the highest rate of claims denied with 6.85 out of every 100. See link.
http://www.statehousecall.org/which-insurer-denies-the-most-claims