Face the facts: Medicare is bankrupt

To all those people on Medicare defending how great it is, you're right. Unfortunately it's one gigantic Ponzi scheme.

If we sent all the senators and congressmen who foisted this scheme on the American public, we couldn't get a quorum in either chamber to hold a hearing.

If every worker in the United States were to stop paying the required Medicare taxes today, Medicare would be bankrupt within five months because there are no actuarial reserves to pay claims.

If an insurance company had zero dollars in the bank to pay their claims the Feds would shut it down and send all its executives to jail, and rightly so. But because taxes are enforced under threat of law the government can do as it pleases.

Either taxes must be increased on the fewer and fewer remaining workers or benefits must be cut. And that "suggestion" that in that last months of someone's life their benefits will be terminated will become an instant reality. When a government is spending thousands of dollars to save a 90 year old to live another month or so, it doesn't take much imagination for a federal bureaucrat to say "no more money for him". Cut his life support and say bye bye.

Bob Lowth

Arlington Heights