Facing Up Blog Carnival: Medicare

Mending America's fiscal issues will be an immensely complicated feat. Still, with the proper policies and political considerations, our fiscal woes can be rectified. In this edition of Facing Up's blog carnival, we are taking Medicare to task.

Public Agenda and Facing Up include the following overview/analysis here on the Facing Up site. With that said, I've republished it for the purposes of our Medicare blog carnival. The following text provides an overview of the problems associated with America's Medicare system.

It’s coming… in June, Congress will decide whether to increase Medicare premiums yet again to cover the cost of paying doctors more. Jacking up Medicare premiums on seniors because Congress has repeatedly failed to fix a flawed system just doesn’t sound very fair.

It is no secret that our economy is the middle of a recession, as evidenced by massive layoffs in the financial services market, exploding energy prices and the increase in jobless claims.

Mark Duggan and Fiona Scott Morton published a paper at NBER with this general conclusion:

The Trustees Report intermediate projection for Medicare costs in 2085 is about 11% of payroll.

From time to time, DemocracySpace joins other public-interest blogs in writing about an issue proposed by Facing Up to the Nation's Finances, a non-partisan project on the long-term implications of the federal budget.

The Federal government and private industries such as General Motors and John Deere & Co. are grappling with what to do about spiraling costs for healthcare and health insurance. Here are short snippets from longer articles on this issue:

With a greying population, Medicare costs are anticipated to rise drastically over the coming decades, and with each passing day, each one of us approaches the day where, God willing, we would be covered under a Medicare Program, either upon reaching the age of sixty fi