In 1965 President Johnson said “If it has a few defects, I am confident those can be quickly remedied,” when he sign Medicare into law. But, hey, it’ll work this time if we just nationalize the entire healthcare system! That would never go bankrupt. We should nationalize the military, too! Just look at that totally non-bankrupt Canada with its nationalized health care. It’s amazing what decades of funding will do to a government program. From the article: “Among the glaring defects, the GAO found 23,400 fake or bad addresses on Medicare’s list of providers.” What counts as a “bad” address? Is it a typo? How many people are on Medicare? What percentage of addresses is this? I’d have to imagine less than 1% And despite Medicaid’s vast costs, its ridiculously low provider payment rates leave millions of poor people without access to doctors and dentists. Nearly a third of doctors were refusing to take new Medicaid patients even before ObamaCare was adding millions to the program. How does Medicaid simultaneously have “vast costs” while the program itself isn’t providing any care? It would be nice to know more details on this, because either this some earth shattering waste/fraud/abuse that only Investors knows about but won’t tell us how it works, or this is bullshiat and they can’t provide actual sources. Those are both subjective adjectives. The costs are “vast” in the sense that in the aggregate they become a big part of state budgets, a part they feel the feds coerce them into spending, but the program can also can have “ridiculously low provider payment rates” when compared to private insurance. And it is a lot lower. It’s obviously a complicated problem but the upshot is that we need more doctors, especially more doctors in general practice, and we need them to spend more time seeing patients and less time seeing pharma reps and golfing. Not only would replacing these programs with a voucher system motivate those lazy, entitled permanently disabled people and lazy, entitled senior citizens no insurance company would touch, the dollars delivered to Job Creating Small Business heroes would result in the trickle-down being laden with only the finest kidney-filtered medicines! Both programs (and Social Security which Republicans also hate) bring in enough taxes to cover their costs. Republicans even fought hard to make sure everyone sees those taxes explicitly on their paychecks. Yet very few people have any problem paying those taxes, because its one of the few government programs they know will be taking care of them when their time comes and makes retirement a real possibility for everyone.