Speaking of donut holes, the Obamacare plan sort of has one at about $40K in income for singles. The subsidies phase out, and I don't see where your premiums are tax deductible like group employer plans. You can only deduct if self employed, and not for payroll tax, only income tax.
My biggest complaints are mandated essential benefits that really are not "free" and unequal tax deduct-ability for individual plans.
As for medicare and medicaid, the reimbursements are too low for the doctors, and are only going to get much worse, transferring more cost.
If you want to be, press one. If you want not to be, press 2
Republicans are red, democrats are blue, neither of them, gives a flip about you.
It's really kind of funny comparing Medicare to private insurance because they are two different animals.
Private insurance needs to make a profit or at least break even to survive. Medicare has no such concern as the government can just print more money or borrow to make it look viable.
Even though they contribute little of the total cost of the program, Medicare premiums have been going way up (as have the payroll taxes). Let's just look at Part B, the hospitalization plan. From 2000 to 2010 the premiums have gone up over 100%, from $45.50 to $96.40. So Medicare is hardly perfect in that regard.
In 2010, Medicare Part B lost $32.3 billion (assuming I'm reading the charts correctly). The premiums collected only amounted to $3.3 billion. No private insurance company could operate like that. If the government were responsible and tried to make up the loss with premiums only, premiums would have to go up a factor of 10X. So seniors really should be paying closer to $1000 a month for their Medicare Part B benefit (or increase the payroll tax so every worker pays more). And even that would just be a partial, temporary fix.
