Medicare Report - Part III - Nonprofit FICA Compared to Private Insurance

By: Dan Reed, American Citizen

The Nonprofit FICA Medicare System

The nonprofit, low overhead, payroll tax financed FICA system has efficiently administered Medicare since 1965! The FICA is a federal organization with a 46-year history of collecting Medicare payroll taxes, and depositing them into the nonprofit Medicare trust fund. The Medicare trust fund is used to pay: hospitals, doctors, medical equipment companies, and drug companies, when Medicare patients use their Medicare medical benefits. 

Because the nonprofit FICA administers both Social Security and Medicare, FICA administrative costs are about 30% less than those of private for-profit health insurance companies. In fact, the FICA Medicare system actually saves money – a lot of money – when compared with private for-profit health insurance premiums!

 

It’s true that Medicare spending has risen dramatically over time! However, it’s also true that private insurance premiums and profits have risen much more dramatically over the same period of time!

Private For-Profit Health Insurance in the U.S.A

As nonprofit, community based organizations; private health insurers were once a benefit to millions of workers and thousands of businesses! However, over many decades, these nonprofit, communities based health insurers evolved into private for-profit health insurance corporations.

The private health insurance industry in the United States “Is Not A Free Market!” In fact, since the nineteen fifties, private health insurance corporations have been exempted from U.S. anti-trust laws, which allowed them to operate as “Monopolies”: fixing prices, dividing markets, buying competitors, and price rationing health care availability too millions of uninsured Americans!

Private health insurance premiums are designed to increase insurance company profits! For decades, these private health insurance monopolies have operated a business modal based on: rationing health care coverage to the uninsured, and denying health care claims to the insured!

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Now, Republicans want to privatize Medicare by phasing out the nonprofit FICA Medicare system, and phasing in "direct federal premium support payments” to private for-profit health insurance monopolies! These Private Health Insurance bureaucracies add zero value to healthcare, and only "duplicate existing FICA Medicare services". So, why are Democrats and the media not asking?

1. Where’s the gain from forcing seniors out of an admittedly expensive Medicare system, into a significantly more expensive private health insurance system? 

2. Why would Republicans want to provide “Direct Federal Premium Support Payments” to private health insurance monopolies?

3. Why would Republicans trust senior’s health care to an industry monopoly that has a well-documented history of increasing corporate profits by cheating its customers?