Chase Bank[/caption]Editor-----Business titans, many of whom have incomes far in excess of ordinary business owners and whose power has become increasingly felt in social and political areas, consider Medicare a program that needs to be cut, putting millions of seniors at risk.
What are these changes and cuts corporate executives want? First of all, they want to raise the age beyond the current entry age of 65, considering that this will reduce the number of participants. In addition, many executives want to see the program as private pay or relying on insurance companies as opposed to the government. And finally, they want to make it dependent on income.
Let's examine some of those issues. First of all, the United States is virtually the only developed nation in the world that still relies on private insurers for the bulk of the population's options for health care. This has meant great profits for private insurance companies and the ability for these companies to restrict care, putting those with significant health problems at greater and greater risk.
The United States also has one of the largest groups of seniors, as a percentage of the population, facing bankruptcy because of medical care costs, as even with Medicare there are extra costs. Medicare pays not all but much of health care costs for any given medical condition, but there are still residual costs that require seniors to use private savings. Certainly nursing home and long-term care support requires private pay, something many seniors do not have the money for as lifespans have increased as have the costs of care. So it is possible to have considerable savings and still become impoverished as a result of medical costs. It must be added that attorneys often counsel the elderly on exactly how to transfer assets and impoverish themselves in order to quality for help when they need it, given the income qualifications that presently exist. And the transfer of assets and other mechanisms used to reduce income to qualify for Medicaid has a series of rules that create barriers as well.
The Business Roundtable includes executives from AT&T, Boeing, Dow Chemical, Exxon Mobil, General Electric, JPMorgan, Walmart and others.
So as companies consider options for Medicare and worry about their bottom line, the fact remains these same companies pay high salaries to their top executives that put them far beyond even the average business owner in the United States, and many of them represent companies whose actions helped to create the financial debacle that led to the recent recession.
