g5000
Diamond Member
- Nov 26, 2011
- 126,465
- 70,230
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What are your ideas?
I've been posting my ideas on here for years.
Ready? It is going to be longer than a tweet.
1. We should be buying our health insurance the same way we buy our home, auto, and life insurance. I should be able to pick up the phone and call any insurance company in the country and buy the insurance I want. This way, I have maximum leverage since I can hang up if I am not satisfied and call any one of a constellation of competitors, just like I do now with my home, auto, and life insurance.
2. We need to eliminate employer sponsored health insurance (ESHI). ESHI is one of the biggest drivers of increasing health care costs. Also, employees are completely hostage to their employer's insurance. There is no negotiation. It is a take it or leave it proposition from a single insurer. And if you lose your job, you lose your health insurance. And you don't get new insurance until you have been in your new job for up to six months. With my home, auto, and life insurance, I get bundle discounts and long term customer discounts.
We can easily disincentivize ESHI by eliminating the tax exemption we currently have for ESHI.
3. We need LESS government in health care, not more. The government is the biggest market entity in the health insurance market, and it gets to write the rules for its private sector competitors. This is not the case in the auto, home, and life insurance markets, where prices have been DROPPING.
4. Raise the Social Security and Medicare eligibility ages to 70 immediately and index to 9 percent of the population going forward. When Social Security was enacted, the average life expectancy was 60 and only 6 percent of Americans were over the age of 65. When Medicare was added on top, 9 percent of Americans were over the age of 65. Today, average life expectancy is 78 and nearly 15 percent of Americans are over the age of 65. We have nearly tripled our "entitlement" load.
We are living longer, we should be working longer.
Social Security was insurance. Not everyone was expected to collect. Now it is an entitlement.
We need to index the retirement age to either life expectancy or back to 9 percent of the population.
When we average life expectancy to 100 years, are we going to live one third of our lives on Social Security? I don't think so! We clearly need to raise the eligibility age.
Raise the eligibility age to 70. That's not even life expectancy, but you would be paying into Social Security and Medicare five more years and drawing out five less years. That's an astronomical savings of federal outlays right there.