With healthcare reorganization in the forefront of everyone’s mind today, the existing healthcare programs for America’s aging population are still limping down the road, but for how long?

Medicare, a component of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” program signed into law in 1965, was never proposed to be the all encompassing, everything for everybody program that it has grown into today. It was sold as a “short term program” for those low income people who had no access to healthcare otherwise. And, the cost of the program was to be “modest” by Government standards.

Sound familiar?

How Medicare will be affected by President Obama’s revised universal healthcare plan, is anyone’s guess. The senior residents of America is apparently expendable in political terms as the new programs take shape. European health programs, upon which the new Administration’s plan seems to be based, routinely pare services to elderly patients when the economics of keeping someone alive outweighs the “value” that person adds to society. It is worrying that, that kind of healthcare may be on the horizon for our own mature citizens soon.

Medicare is not a wonderful system, but it has settled into a effective program for those aging citizens who otherwise would not have healthcare insurance. Broken into parts, A & B Medicare helps with the cost of health care, but it does not cover all medical expenses or the cost of most long-term care. Those entitled for free Medicare hospital insurance (Part A) may join in Medicare Part B by paying a monthly premium. There is also a prescription drug component (part D) and a program called Medicare Advantage (part C) which is an HMO or PPO choice for the Medicare program. Part B of the program is designed to pay doctors and suppliers that are not covered by hospital insurance.

Should seniors be wary of the new anticipated health care program? Will it replace the existing Medicare system, as we know it? Is it going to be more expensive to carry out? Will the new system be less effective (even though Medicare is not all that proficient today)? Can we with conviction trust the Government to run the programs to our mutual benefit? Are we destined to try to be like the Government run health care programs found in Europe, Canada and elsewhere around the world?

The answers to those and many more questions have not been addressed by congress and in all probability will not be prior to enacting some kind of universal health care program. So, Medicare may very well be on the chopping block, at least Medicare as we know it.

Some form of health care for America’s seniors will surly come out of the new program. How it will look and how it will perform are two more very important unanswered questions. Sadly the questions may remain unanswered until it is simply too late to do anything about it.

Paul Woodall
Mansions Affordable Housing
Houston, Texas

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