Medicare and Medicaid

Medicare is a program to help elderly with medical costs while Medicaid more specifically deals with low-income elderly or financially needy people. Medicare and Medicaid were designed to help retirees with costs of medical bills due to the assumption that most elderly people have higher medical bills. Medicare is a federally run program that goes hand in hand with social security. When you are working, some money is deducted for Medicare so when you retire you will have those benefits to look forward to. The rules for Medicaid, however, differ from state to state. Medicare insurance helps to cover hospital stays, post hospital stays, home health care, doctor and laboratory costs, out patient services, and prescription drugs. Medicaid fully covers other costs that Medicare doesn’t such as eyeglasses, and diagnostic and preventive care. For Medicare, you must pay a certain percentage for the different medical bills you receive but not all. For Medicaid some states will charge small amounts for some services. Basically Medicaid is a cheaper version of Medicare.

Healthcare seems to be more important than social security to everyone because it pertains to your individual health. Although it is the bigger problem, most politicians seek to tackle the raging social security issue rather than healthcare because it is just too difficult to solve. Because of the rising healthcare costs, politicians need to do something to end this problem, but each solution comes with its own fault.

Possible solutions include cutting payments to doctors and hospitals from Medicare. This poses a problem because if costs are cut, doctors and hospitals may refuse service to patients of Medicare like they have already been doing with some Medicaid insured citizens.

Another solution is to increase the amount that is taken from senior citizens to help cover Medicare costs. However, senior citizens cannot afford to pay more because of inflation and other rising costs.

A third is cutting back on what treatments are given to patients insured with Medicare by refusing to provide some high tech and expensive procedures. This worries people because some feel like it’s giving the elderly second-rate healthcare, which doesn’t seem entirely fair.

Medicare could possibly restrict eligibility by increasing the benefit receiving age to sixty-seven instead of sixty-five. It would save them billions of dollars but some politicians are pulling in the other direction saying that healthcare should be available earlier for people who have health coverage from their jobs.

Another option is to use a free-market to help costs. Insurance plans, hospitals, doctors, and prescription drugs would all compete to lower costs. This poses a problem though, because using this HMO (health maintenance organization) system, the government has to pay more per citizen than for one just insured by regular Medicare.