Letter: Medicare dilemma requires ideas

EDITOR,
It’s hard to know whether Anna Eshoo wrote any part of the commentary published last week (“Preserve Medicare for seniors’ sake,” July 15), or whether it was constructed by some central Democratic Party apparatchik, being so similar to other Ryan “Medi-Scare” hit pieces around the press these last few weeks.
But one thing’s for sure: When it comes to Medicare, politicians like Eshoo are simply out of ideas. And so they bash a man of ideas like Paul Ryan.
She spends most of a full page shooting down the Ryan budget’s specific plan for Medicare reform, offering no alternative of her own.
Perhaps it is unfair to single Eshoo out on this score. Since Ryan published his budget and since it passed the House, the President and Congress (Republicans and Donald Trump among them) have done nothing but fret about it, telling the American people what they think we want to hear: No need for big changes, we can keep it running, just tax the guy next door.
Yet, the Medicare Trustees reported this year that the program will be insolvent five years early, by 2024. With the baby boom retiring, sustaining “Medicare-as-we-know-it” will require either huge tax increases, tightened eligibility or British-style rationing. The program already denies treatment at a higher rate than private insurance and pays doctors a fraction of what they charge. An alternative is to redefine and restructure the program to fit today’s needs and demographics, as Ryan suggests.
If Anna Eschoo is such a guardian at the gate for Medicare, why did she vote for Obamacare, which strips away $500 billion from Medicare to fund its new bureaucracy? By abolishing Obamacare, the Ryan budget actually puts that half trillion back into the program.
As a man in my 50s, my first objective is to support my family, not the government. I also look forward to taking advantage of Medicare, because I’ve paid many thousands of dollars into it over my lifetime. But if the price of that program is spending most of my working days paying the government, and seeing my children doomed to the same lifetime of servitude, count me out. Time to rethink Medicare, Social Security and other so-called entitlements.
David deMilo, Scotts Valley