Word: programed
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...retirement, the government's cost of providing for their health care will skyrocket, to the point where the entire system is projected to run out of money by 2025. Gore has proposed shoring it up with bags of cash--he would add five years to the life of the program by shifting $435 billion from the general budget. The money would pay off part of the national debt, and the future savings on interest payments would go to Medicare. But that is a temporary fix, which is why some politicians are daring to say out loud that privatizing much...
...radioactive in politics. Former candidate Bill Bradley learned that lesson when Gore used the word to paint Bradley's health-care plan as a paltry handout. There is a long history of such scorching moments in fights over health-care reform, particularly when they involve Medicare, a program that is literally a life-and-death matter to the nation's most engaged voting bloc, the elderly. Gingrich found out the hard way as he tried to restructure the program in 1995 to squeeze hundreds of billions of dollars...
Americans have not decided which kind of bureaucrat they dislike more: the ones who work for the Federal Government or those who work for insurance companies. In a TIME/CNN poll last week, roughly equal numbers put more trust in HMOs (41%) vs. the Medicare program (39%) to provide better health care, while 20% were not sure. But early tests of how well private insurance companies treat seniors have not been promising. Health-maintenance organizations rushed in when the government gave them a larger opening in the Medicare market three years ago. This summer scores of HMOs announced that they...
...insurance companies claim they cannot make a profit on the amount Medicare reimburses them for coverage, and they are stymied by tens of thousands of pages of rules for providing services under the program. Bush promises to modernize the regulations and the fee structure--he would add $150 billion more to Medicare over 10 years--but has provided little detail on how he would do so. He cites the popular health program for federal employees as a model for the structure he would set up for Medicare, but critics say the experiences of that younger, healthier government work force have...
When it comes to prescription drugs for the needy elderly, the first experiment with the free market has yet to work. Nevada last March invited hundreds of insurance companies to bid on its new program providing drug coverage for low- and moderate-income people age 62 and older, but only one insurer responded--and it was disqualified because it was not licensed to do business in the state. Nevada reworked its plan, making clearer what it expected of the companies, and got five proposals in time for a second deadline, in August. The state is reviewing the proposals...