http://thehill.com/homenews/house/363642-ryan-pledges-entitlement-reform-in-2018
This is where the elderly got their Medicare yanked and the poor get thrown into the trash bin.
But for God sake’s, save the fetus!!!
Entitlement reform has to happen no matter what else is going on. Or, we do nothing and seniors see their SS drop by 25% and Medicare stops covering whole swathes of services.
Since Trump promised not to touch entitlements, I think we should go with the latter. Just let them go insolvent.
I can’t see any fundamental reforms/changes/cuts to entitlements in the near future. Cutting Social Security is still a loser issue, and with Republicans nervous about the mid-term elections, you think they are going to throw their bodies in front of that train?
No. Way.
Us geezers are not a shrinking part of the population (quite the contrary), so it’s likely to be even more of a loser proposition going forward. We vote more reliably than you young whippersnappers, too! 
Intelligent changes to most entitlement programs should be a priority of every thinking American: some intelligent tweaks to SS retirement; some “rationing” of health care; adjustments to SS disability; adjustments to VA disability…
Unfortunately, intelligent adjustments are not what I expect of elected officials of either party. Instead, I expect broad brushstrokes, which will disparately affect the most disadvantaged (and, coincidentally, I’m sure - least likely to vote!) Moreover, it would be nice to have such changes spurred by a desire to accomplish laudable aims, rather than to finance tax breaks for the wealthy.
Minor tweaks are all that we need. Modest raises in payroll taxes and perhaps some adjustments to the inflation models or indexing based on location or whatever. For Medicare, allowing it to negotiate drug prices would go a long way. But one party wants to save these programs, while Repubs have spent the last 80 years trying to destroy SS and the past 50 years trying to kill Medicare.
The drug prices thing only helps with Medicare Part D and only a little bit. The big problem in Medicare is hospitalization and end of life care. The way this ends is obvious: assume no extraordinary measures unless they specifically ask for it rather than the opposite.
This is it. I don’t know how entitlement gets depicted so negatively when the same people complaining about snap their main spring if anything they’re entitled to is taken away. And at the same time they have no problem denying people the things they’re entitled to as US citizens according to the Constitution. Unless it’s guns.
The trick is getting people to accept a certain amount of pain.
There’s an obvious military analogy: a commander who builds a reputation of being willing to suffer alongside the troops can (assuming his other leadership qualities are reasonably good) get the troops to follow him into hell. The problem is that the Republican leadership’s big fatcat tax cut has established them as perfumed-prince REMFs who couldn’t get anybody to follow them to the whorehouse if they laid down a trail of signed three-day passes.
Your MOS must be a 46 Alpha, or Combat Poet.
They should’ve learned to code.
Saving social security is easy. Lift the cap or change the tax rate.
Right now the tax rate is 12.4% split between employer and employee and only the first $118,000 of income is taxed for social security. Even if you don’t lift the cap, raising the rate by 2.66% (up to 15.06%) would keep the system solvent until around the 22nd century.
So that means if you make 50k a year, you and your employer both pay $665 a year in extra taxes, an extra $55 a month.
If you lift or eliminate the social security cap (they only tax income up to 120k for SS) the tax rate hike could be even lower.
So Social security is easy to solve, if America actually wanted to solve it. Just slowly institute a cap elimination or tax hike.
Health care is a huge problem in America. But the problem is we spend too much and have nothing to show for it. Other wealthy nations spend 8-12% of GDP, we spend 18%. Even nations with similar per capita incomes (Australia or Canada) spend half what we do. We spend about $10,000 per capita on health care while Australia and Canada spend closer to 5-6k despite all these nations having a per capita income of about 50k.
If our health care system were as cost efficient as every other wealthy nation, there’d be no problem. We could keep medicare and medicaid afloat for a long long time.
The problem is the GOP isn’t going to ‘solve’ any of this. They are going to use deficits as an excuse to cut benefits and consumer safety regulation.
Lots of us want to solve social security and health care.
But you solve social security by elimination of the cap and/or raising FICA taxes a little bit, and you solve health care by making our health care system as cost efficient as Canada, Japan, Australia, France, etc.
I know a lady who is really good at that. (So I’ve been told.) I could see if she’d be willing to help.