Social Security is mostly Fine. Medicare is a Mess. Neither would be difficult to fix... [View all]
...if the people of these United States wanted to fix them.
The way to fix Social Security is to get to full employment, and with higher wages.
If, after that, more is needed then raise the cap a little or raise the tax rate a little or have a bake sale.
The way to fix Medicare is to have a national single-payer health system. A system that covers all people would cover older people, on account of them being people.
Without knowing exactly how the financing of that single payer system would shake out, the good news is that we know that the total $$$ currently being spent on healthcare would more than cover it, so there would be no need to steer any greater portion of national GDP to healthcare.
Done and done.
Anybody who talks about the problem of Medicare who is not proposing a single payer system is a crook or a dumbass. Ignore such people. This is a two-party nation and we will, of course, continue trying to make the less bad of two such people President and Congressmen and such, but that is no reason to take them seriously when they whine about healthcare costs without proposing a single-payer system.
Just because we must elect people who parrot idiocy does not then require us to become idiots ourselves. The best solution to health costs is known. If the known solution is "impossible" (sic) then solving the health care cost problem is "impossible" and we might as well just stop talking about it altogether.
It is undignified to have a national circle-jerk to discuss ways other than climbing this ladder we have right here to get onto the roof.
Our problems are voluntary and optional. They are not perplexing. They do not lack solutions. We just chose not to fix them.
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