Health Care System Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Health Care System - Essay Example Even as the range of benefits has broadened, the program still contains what some see as gaps and others regard as areas in which private and state programs need to be strengthened. Either way, most people agree that long-term care represents a contingency for which most are psychologically and financially unprepared. Some suggest that the list of Medicare benefits should be expanded to include payments for nursing homes and other long-term care services. Social Security consisted of two sets of rules. One set governed the payroll taxes, and the other set described the benefits to which workers were entitled. Both the level of taxes and the amount and types of benefits changed over the years. In 1965, legislators raised the tax level and established a major new type of benefit. By adding hospital insurance to the array of Social Security benefits, they launched Medicare. In addition to the original retirement benefits for workers over 65, the new benefits included payments to the wives and children of retired workers and to the widows and children of workers who died before age 65. After 1939, therefore, Social Security included benefits to a worker's survivors (Ruskinm 2009). The second milestone occurred in 1950 when Congress decided to raise the tax rate, and, updating benefit levels for price changes in the 1940s, to increase substantially the level of payments to retired workers and the survivors of workers. Social Security--tha t is, the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program--is by far the largest American social insurance program, with the greatest impact on individuals and families. In 1992, for example, 132 million American workers and their employers paid Social Security taxes and about 41 million Americans received Social Security benefits each month (Peltz, 2008). As living standards improved, more Americans expected to retire, and retirement became widely perceived as a period of earned leisure. State welfare programs for the elderly provided real competition to the Social Security program in the 1930s and 1940s but declined as a threat to Social Security in the 1950s. Medical care became increasingly desirable as a good to consume in the 1940s and 1950s, and the supply of private health insurance increased exponentially in these decades (Ruskinm 2009). Modern Health Care System Medicare and Medicaid programs are based on early insurance programs and plans improved and redesigned by the government. Even so, many indirect infusions of general revenues are made into the program, including the revenue produced from treating a portion of Social Security benefits as taxable income. The second proposal would put Social Security financing on a pay-as-you-go basis. In this approach, Congress collects, through payroll taxes or some other means, only the amount of money necessary to sustain the program on a current basis. This approach, however, has the benefit of keeping taxes low, avoiding the difficult problem of how to preserve the supposed surpluses in the program (Staff 2009). This approach has the disadvantage of leaving the future to take care of itself, arguably bequeathing large burdens to future generations (Staff 2009). The government does not permit this activity to occur in