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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (65669)	4/9/2018 3:04:13 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 366028

Fore Democrats and Republican politicians (and to a large extent voters, and commentators for both parties). The "solution" is indeed to "ignore it unitl it collapses", and probably will be up to the point where collapse is imminent and it becomes their problem rather than something they feel the next guy can handle. All sorts of ways to deal with the problem (not necessarily solutions, there will still be a problem, it doesn't go away its just not as bad if you make the right changes). I'd probably support quite a few of them if there was a serious push for them. But there isn't. Instead you get most people ignoring the problem, and most people (at least most politicians but it probably goes well beyond that) who do propose "solutions" pushing ideas that would make things worse. Ignoring the politics (which you can't when you want to actually do something here but if I follow the politics for now the answer is "do nothing" or at least "do nothing with a serious impact") Social Security is easier to deal with than the medical programs. A big part of why is that its less of a problem in the first place, but also its just government payments to people according to a set formula. Change the formula to pay out less and you reduce the problem. That won't be popular, it will cause some pain, but it is the way to go whether its increasing the retirement age, or changing the indexing of future payment increases. The medical programs are more complex in that they are paying for an escalating cost. At some point "pay out less" means people just don't get the treatment they want. OTOH they could still get better care than is available today. Which would you want if your facing a medical crisis, the best medical care in the world under an unlimited budget in 1970, or the average care you get under Medicare today? Still its real hard to cut people off or make them pay for part of their care which might be unaffordable to them. OTOH this cost insulation (not just Medicare and Medicaid, but private insurance) is a major factor in the increasing costs. And when that happens and the country votes to go socialist Increasing the problems yet further, still some people seem to think digging is the best way to get out of a hole, so it could happen.