Charles Barber
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 While social security was established in 1935, it didn't become a major feature of American life until well after World War II. In 1945, only half a million people received social security benefits;66 Medicaid and Medicare weren't created until 1965. Both of those programs also got off to relatively slow starts but now are massive components of the federal budget. Persons served by Medicare mushroomed from 7 million in 1967 to 27 million in 2002. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 What will it matter if the government is a little more bankrupt because people are living longer and collecting more social security? This massive government theft from private citizens is a system that's going to collapse anyway. Kiss your social security deposits goodbye if you're under 40. Chances are, you'll outlive social security's solvency by a long shot.
Or, to save it, our lawmakers will just keep raising the retirement age to make sure nobody qualifies to collect. Pretty soon it will hit 70, then 75, and then 80. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Medicare or social security benefits to anyone who reaches retirement age, so perhaps it's finding new ways to make sure people never reach retirement age! Keep 'em alive long enough to work 'em to death and collect their tax revenues, then knock 'em off before the benefits kick in!
It's not as far fetched as it sounds: social security payout benefits start at age 65, and the average lifespan of a U.S. citizens is currently 77.6 years. But within the next fifty years, that number is expected to fall to 72. |
Charles Barber
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| In 1945, only half a million people received social security benefits;66 Medicaid and Medicare weren't created until 1965. Both of those programs also got off to relatively slow starts but now are massive components of the federal budget. Persons served by Medicare mushroomed from 7 million in 1967 to 27 million in 2002.67 Collectively, the entitlement programs of social security ($488 billion), Medicaid ($300 billion), and Medicare ($176 billion) now make up almost half of the federal budget.
Feeling entided to all this, we think we are also entided to happiness. |
Shannon Brownlee
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 In an effort to appease the hospital industry after Medicare's politically rocky start, the social security Administration instructed Blue Cross to gather data on how much each hospital had spent in the previous several years; the administration then reimbursed the hospital for its average annual expenses—plus another 2 percent to provide a small profit.
It was a payment plan that rivaled the cushiest of Pentagon deals, and it proved to be a recipe for fiscal disaster. |
| But there was another difference between the two pieces of legislation: Bettercare would allow recipients to have a small deduction taken from their social security checks. Those deductions, which were entirely voluntary, were to be used, along with funds from the general treasury, to purchase private health insurance policies only for the senior citizens who wanted them. Bettercare was entirely voluntary, and it would give private insurers a piece of the action. |
Bill Sardi
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 When the patient's wife asked the herbalist for a social security number, which he couldn't provide, she was quoted to have said: "At that point it all hit me. I knew this guy was a fake and that I'd never see him again. At that moment, it all made sense." She never paid the herbalist the bill for $120,000 and dismissed him from her home.
The LA Times article when on to say: "The therapies for which he and his wife had paid so dearly — using up much of their savings and forsaking traditional cancer treatments that might have prolonged his life — were useless, doctors say. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| Only half of the elderly had any form of health insurance, and many of them were living and dying without benefit of any medical care at all. social security, which was enacted in the 1940s, was a hugely popular program, inspiring proponents of universal health insurance to narrow their sights shrewdly on getting coverage for the aged poor; they would worry about children and the rest of the population later. |
Donna Jackson Nakazawa
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 Taken collectively, these diseases, which also include type 1 diabetes, Graves' disease, vasculitis, myasthenia gravis, connective tissue diseases, autoimmune Addison's disease, vitiligo, rheumatoid arthritis, hemolytic anemia, celiac disease, and scleroderma (see the appendix for full list) are now the number-two cause of chronic illness in America and the third leading cause of social security disability behind heart disease and cancer. (Acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, by contrast, is not an autoimmune disease; in fact, it is entirely different. |
| A top-performing sales rep for an insurance company while in her thirties, Arntsen, who used to run three miles a day, now lives on social security disability—which, she says ruefully, allows time for "my new full-time job—seeing specialists." She gets going each day by around noon and spends what stamina she has left volunteering at the Lupus Foundation of Mid and Northern New York, which has become her "baby," although it can hardly begin to make up for the fact that "the chance to be a mother has been stolen from me. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| Too much medicine
While Wennberg continued gathering his data on variations in how doctors cared for their patients, the nation's medical bill was rising far faster than the social security Administration had anticipated, or budgeted. There were several reasons for the dramatic increase, one of them being more doctors, and in particular more specialists, than ever before. |
Charles Barber
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| Collectively, the entitlement programs of social security ($488 billion), Medicaid ($300 billion), and Medicare ($176 billion) now make up almost half of the federal budget.
Feeling entided to all this, we think we are also entided to happiness. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| Focusing on a few discrete measures is like saying you are going to make a building earthquake-proof by bolting the furniture to the floor, or reform social security by switching to a cheaper brand of ink for writing the checks.
The question is, how can we move the five thousand hospitals and eight hundred thousand physicians in this country to organize themselves into cooperative groups? One way to do it would be to allow the VHA to take over failing hospitals. My colleague Phillip Longman, in his book Best Care
. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 This is not appreciated in America because it competes with our own home-grown poisoning method that prefers to poison consumer more slowly, bilking them for hundreds of thousands of dollars in monopoly priced medications and hopefully killing them off right before Medicare or social security might kick in.
So the next time some ignorant bureaucrat (or friend, or family member) mentions to you how dangerous China's food products are, just ask them these simple questions:
1) Why does the FDA allow leukemia-causing chemicals to be added to hot dogs that are consumed by children? |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Privatizing social security so that workers own their savings accounts and the federal government can no longer swipe funds from social security. 3) Launching a national health insurance program that covers everyone and relies on a system of government-issued vouchers that citizens can spend with health insurance companies.
These radical reforms are necessary because the future gap between what the government owes and what it stands to receive in revenues is already monstrously large, and it's growing by the minute. |
| Another is an immediate and permanent two-thirds cut in social security and Medicare benefits. A third alternative, were it feasible, would be to immediately and permanently cut all federal discretionary spending by 143 percent."
If you read that last paragraph with any presence of mind, you now begin to understand the magnitude of the fiscal problem facing the United States. It could be solved, as explained above, by doubling all personal and corporate income taxes. But then what's the point in working? It could also be solved by slashing promised benefits in social security and Medicare. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Chances are, you'll outlive social security's solvency by a long shot.
Or, to save it, our lawmakers will just keep raising the retirement age to make sure nobody qualifies to collect. Pretty soon it will hit 70, then 75, and then 80. All they have to do is raise the age to the point where fewer than 5% of the population even lives that long. Let's face it: social security is just a legalized Ponzi scheme -- a system of generational theft that takes money from one group of working people and hands it over to another. And just like a classic Ponzi scheme, the promises can't be met. |
| And don't blame social security for the fact that your own food and lifestyle habits add up to an average lifespan of about 53. That's your own fault, not the government's. Even people who know what's unhealthy still manage to conspire against their own good sense and eat that stuff anyway.
That's the real conspiracy here, folks.
Because remember this: you can't control the lawmakers in Washington. You can't control the future of social security. You can't even control the FDA. But you can darn well control what you put in your own mouth. |
Devra Davis
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 He called the AM A the "American Meddlers Association" and lamented the fact that they had forced the government to drop plans to include health care in social security.34
The ACS wanted nothing to do with such programs. Every member of the board remained aligned with those who defended fee-for-service medicine conducted solely by doctors in their offices. The notion of cancer clinics or centers was considered socialistic and an affront to the private practice of medicine. |
David Steinman
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 You had hundreds of undocumenteds, not eager for any attention, often not using legal social security information or even a real name, and the suit went from one attorney to another and never found its advocate because there would be so many problems. The people were afraid if they acted up they would get into trouble, and so they stayed quiet because they were afraid if they were put on the stand they would say something to incriminate themselves. Most people, if they got a big settlement, received five or six hundred dollars for their troubles. |
Mehmet C. Oz., M.D. and Michael F. Roizen, M.D.
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 Perhaps in response to this discovery, Congress inked the social security Act into law six months later.
You'd think the rats would have been ecstatic. Living longer, plus retirement income. But no! Although they were living longer, the rats complained that their quality of life had declined (probably because of the lack of golf courses or bingo). But since calories represent energy and energy is required to function, it wasn't surprising that the rats were tired all the time. What is surprising, though, is that their sluggishness passed. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| It's not as far fetched as it sounds: social security payout benefits start at age 65, and the average lifespan of a U.S. citizens is currently 77.6 years. But within the next fifty years, that number is expected to fall to 72.6 years, meaning that after working your whole life paying taxes, health insurance and more taxes, you'll have a grand total of 7.6 years to enjoy a measly monthly check from the government before you keel over.
And that's assuming the U.S. government doesn't raise the retirement age (which they will) even further in order to save money. |
Michael J. Panzner
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 Bush administration to privatize social security, have gone nowhere. This failure partly reflects the reality that those who benefit from an all-encompassing social safety net are growing in numbers—and political clout.
Ironically, the retirement-related concerns in the private sector seem almost inconsequential in comparison. Nonetheless, they are another layer on an ever-growing fiscal disaster, a burden that must ultimately be paid for in one way or another. Like the public sector, corporate America has significant exposure to retiree health care costs. |
| The private pension system will be a far cry from what it used to be, if it even exists at all, while social security will almost certainly have little to offer for most of today's workers. Those who haven't managed to provide for their own future will discover that the official retirement age, which will likely be pushed back by at least ten years over the next few decades, will be little more than a milestone that marks another phase of life on the job. |
| To make up the difference, Smetters and Gokhale have warned that social security and Medicare payroll taxes would "need to double immediately," according to the Christian Science Monitor. The problems will grow even more intractable if health care spending exceeds the nearly 10 percent annual increases of recent decades, or if Washington adds other entitlement programs, such as the Medicare prescription benefit, which alone contributed more than $8 trillion to the total. |
| In recent years, however, actuaries have increasingly warned about the rapidly rising cost of entitlement programs, such as social security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the largesse of which have grown over time.
Undoubtedly, complacency has played a part. The United States has successfully weathered other so-called fiscal storms in the past. America thrived in the years leading up to 2006, even though we consumed far more than we produced and spent much more than we earned. |
| In 1942, seven years after social security was first established, there were 42 workers for every beneficiary. By 2002, the ratio was down to 3.3, and by 2030, it is expected to drop by another 50 percent to 2.2.
Municipal finances will also feel the strain of an aging population. So will private-sector pension plans, especially in industries such as steel, autos, utilities, and airlines, which once employed hundreds of thousands of workers.
For many people, hardest to swallow will be the realization that American prosperity is no longer limitless. |
| Barring major spending cuts or tax hikes, the combination of higher interest rates, the costly war in Iraq, and various other forms of public sector profligacy could help boost the national debt by another $3 trillion by 2010, according to experts cited by USA Today in November 2005 And that figure does not even take into account other obligations, such as social security and Medicare.
Like individuals and companies, governments have often relied on debt to make up for shortfalls when current income is lacking. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| Mills changed his mind about Medicare when polls showed that two thirds of Americans supported it, but he intended to protect the financial solvency of the social security Administration, which would manage Medicare once it passed, by becoming the bill's sponsor. His defection, Michael J. O'Neill wrote in the New York Daily News, stunned the AMA: "They considered [it] the ultimate perfidy . . . And Mills was furious with them for their blind refusal to accept reality. |
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