On his website and in his book, The Revolution: A Manifesto, Ron Paul asserts:
Can anyone provide some information to back up this claim? Any good books about the history of Medicare?
On his website and in his book, The Revolution: A Manifesto, Ron Paul asserts:
Can anyone provide some information to back up this claim? Any good books about the history of Medicare?
This article addresses hospital enrollment for the elderly:
Also, the poverty rate for the elderly plummeted during the late 60’s, in part because, the elderly used to foot the bill for much of their own care:
As a practical matter, Medicare/Medicad make up almost half of US medical spending. Even if doctors are really generous, its unlikely they could provide their current sevices with only half the revenue.
Medicare costs 100 bucks a month. Then it pays for 80 percent of the care.
Thanks, Simplicio. Paul’s statement did not exactly ring true for me.
The article the OP links has a few good points in it, hidden amongst some rambling and often contradictory assertions. But I point specifically to the sentence immediately after the one the OP quotes (bolding appears at the web page):
In his book (from which the quote is taken), Paul goes on to say…
This is straight out of the Libertarian playbook, the belief that private charity will fill the need that government insists on filling, if only they were allowed to. (Trying not to stray into GD territory here, just stating the facts.) As a historical fact, though, it’s hard to find any evidence that supports that.
Paul cites as his source a book by prominent Libertarian David Beito called “From Mutual Aid to Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967.” That book has no footnotes, but does have a 13 page “bibliographical essay.” I can’t discern the original source to support Paul’s claim. I’m very dubious.
It wasn’t just the doctors providing free care for the poor (of all ages), it was the insured and non-poor patients who subsidized the care of the poor. All hospitals, many of them non-profit providers of a great deal of free care, padded the bills of the paying patients to cover the cost of providing charity care. Medicare was supposed to be a better way of covering the cost of medical care to the poor elderly. It also converted a lot of people from being charity cases to being paying patients (even if the government was covering most of the tab).
I’m sure there were some good things about the good old days when benevolent doctors and hospital administrators could decide who deserved charity care and how much they deserved, but soaking the paying patients wasn’t one of them and it seems likely to me that a lot of people put off needed care when they could only get is as a charity patient.
As a caveat, health care was far far less expensive (both in real dollars and as a % of GDP) back before 1965, when medicare and medicaid were created.
So you can’t really compare health care access in 2011 with health care access pre-1965, which Paul is trying to do. Today a broken bone can cost thousands of dollars if you go to the ER, and minor outpatient surgery can run into 5 figures. That wasn’t the case in the 1950s. The elderly in the 1950s probably could afford to see a doctor or go to a hospital w/o medicare, today that is far less likely to be the case. So you have to factor that in too, medical access w/o medicare or medicaid from the 1950s and early 1960s won’t give you info on medical access in 2011 since costs are so much higher.
As for the history of medicare, I believe it is an offshoot of attempts at universal coverage that were started under FDR and Truman. Eventually it was settled somehow that the elderly and poor would get universal coverage instead of everyone (which sucks, life would be a lot better if those programs were universal) so medicare and medicaid were created in the 60s.