Reply #23: Look at it this way. Medicare represents something.

[Capitalocracy]

Medicare is charged with ideological significance on a level that touches on the underlying philosophy of governance. Do you think the government should help people out, that it is a democratic collective project that we all decide to use for our common benefit, or do you think the government is nothing more than the administrator of police to protect you from your neighbor and an army to protect you from the rest of the world?

Medicare is unsustainable if health care costs increase. Health care costs increase as a result of private businesses inflating those costs and raking in gigantic profits. Why? Because they can... you either fork over the money, or you die. Often painfully.

So there are two possible solutions to this problem. One is to completely overhaul the system, and offer single-payer health care. You might as well, the only other way to save medicare would be to create government-run infrastructure, hospitals and clinics, where people can go without paying inflated prices. If you're going to take on that kind of project and make enough of these hospitals and clinics for them to service seniors and disabled people, you might as well just implement single payer while you're at it. Or you could just put strict limits on what hospitals and clinics can charge... $300 for a patch of gauze that costs less than $5 at the pharmacy seems a little excessive, after all. But the "free market" is not going to solve this thing.

The other "solution" is to just get rid of Medicare. Hey, that will solve the national deficit problem... but all it will do is transfer that cost to the people. Really, what's the difference between all the people of a nation getting buried in debt due to medical costs, and incurring a huge national debt due to the same inflated medical costs? It's just as bad, actually worse, if the people of the nation are impoverished by this than if the collective representation of those people, the government, is buried in debt. And those prices would not go down, they'd continue to go up. All it would cause is general poverty, suffering, and death.

But beyond that, if Medicare works and people like it (and they do), then it's an argument in favor of the idea that we as a society can work together to build something bigger than what we can produce individually. And if they manage to destroy it, they continue perpetuating that concept that government can't do anything right, get that big government out of my life, and all that. If they can remove any positive interaction people have with the government, not only can they appeal to people with their anti-government rhetoric and retain control and continue making the situation worse, they can convince people to drop out and get rid of people who might otherwise vote or volunteer or come up with new ideas or run for office.