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I need to correct an error in my last post. The working poor and those not working, but who qualify via a means and assets test....when they need medical treatment, they apply for and receive another form of welfare benefits....medicaid....not medicare. Medicare is paid for by those who pay into the system a set aside from the FICA deduction from their paychecks.

You must be retired and receiving SSI, or permanently disabled as SSI defines it, and have that status for a year, before you are eligible to receive medicare insurance coverage, and in addition to the deductions from your income when you were working, medicare deducts a portion of your monthly SSI benefit check, which for newly eligible medicare enrollees, is above $75 per month, and those covered by medicare must also pay a monthly fee of at least $40 to a private insurer for the recently passed presciption coverage, and that $40 or more monthly premium covers "gap" fees for medical treatment that are not fully paid by medicare, and there is a $15.00 or so...."co-pay" required for each treatment "session" received.....vs. medicaid, which costs nothing when received, but is subject to collection efforts if child support of a patient is found to be in arrears, or when a recipient receives a lawsuit settlement or experiences an economic turnaround that results in asset accumulation....equity in a residence or extra income from managing to obtain a well paying job.

I suspect that the majority of medicaid and welfare recipients do not rise economically to a level where they accumulate "on the books" assets great enough to be pursued by state or local welfare benefits administrators, though.....

Ten years ago, I was pursued by a state welfare collections unit because my ex-wife had failed to surrender the weekly child support payments that I had reliably paid to her, for my son's maintenance.....while she also collected welfare. I was able to "head off" the state's attempt to collect more than $20k in child support and interest that it determined I owed....by attending a hearing where I produced several hundred cancelled checks which they examined and made copies of. They also commented that the $5,000 or so that my ex-wife had received in welfare checks had been paid back by her attorney after she won a judgment against the other driver who struck her car and injured her, resulting in her being unable to work while she recovered from the injuries and qualified for welfare benefits....

....all of the collection efforts by public agencies to recover medicaid expenses paid out, and the costs of litigation resulting from attempts to recover medical expenses resulting from accidents and injuries......and the expenses of insurance company administration and marketing, and the cost to the rest of us for M&A as I described in an example I posted a while back....Bill Frist's family's insurance and hospital care company, HCA, going public and then being taken private, generating huge fees for investment bankers and legal firms, during each financial "move"....could all be eliminated if a single payer medical treatment model could eliminate medicare, medicaid, and the mozaic that private insurance "coverage" is today.....

It's all avoidable "churning" of records and eligibility hurdles, fee manipulation, and profits paid to the owners of the private entities that benefit from the status quo. Can't we simply create an ISG, Baker Commission styled panel to study how France, Cuba, Canada, and the UK do payment for medical treatment, adopt the best from the panel's findings, and junk the mess that we "enjoy" today, and that doesn't cover (protect the assets against medical aggravated bankruptcy....and the resources devoted to working out those personal insolvencies that wouldn't happen from major illness or accident, in France or Canada....) of so many of us?

Don't forget that, two years ago, congressional leaders orchestrated the rejection of all proposed amendments to now existing bankruptcy "reform" legislation that coukl have exempted from the "reform" those households who were bankrupted by unexpected medical expenses? The Harvard study used at the time to justify the exemption amendments, persuasively demonstrated that at least half of those forced into medical expense triggered bankruptcy, were insured for at least a portion of their medical expenses, and were bankrupted despite being covered.........

....and .....sigh..... jorgelito....good for you....bettering yourself....but what you did is not a solution for folks with lower IQ's and aptitude than average...somewhere potentially encompassing 40 percent of the working age population. If your personal anecdote could be applied universally, how do you explain the fact that 150 million....half the population, own just 2-1/2 percent of all US assets? Do you dismiss this result as a symptom of laziness, other priorities....or, what? Do you shop for groceries or consumer goods? Do you stay in hotels, or have your garbage collected, your car washed....etc...etc...
Doesn't it occur to you that your anecdotal experience if ludicrous when you attempt to apply it universally? How many low skilled illegal immigrants would it take to replace all of the low paid, low skilled workers who we encounter in our everyday lives, if they all simply "did what you did", tripled their incomes?

How much would a hamburger cost at Mickey Dee's....in that kind of a world that is never gonna happen....and who would cook it, serve it, slaughter, butcher, pack, and deliver the beef that it was made from, and shovel the manure away from the animal that donated the meat for your burger?

Can you not look past your own anecdotal life experience to consider that your solution was beneficial to you, and sooooo much of it was beyond your own control....you didn't choose your parents, your genes, your IQ and other abilities that you found yourself in possession of. Consider that you experienced a fortunate accident of birth, timing, and circumstance. One sixth of the world doesn't have access to clean water, and 38 percent of US children are in households with income below the poverty line. Half of us have lower than average IQ's. Some of us are not fully using all of our given intelligence quotients either.

Translation....your anecdotal experience of how you came to afford and maintain private health insurance coverage speaks more of what I think that you ignore about the situations and potential of those without coverage, than it does about a solution of much practical potential to mitigate the health care distribution problem.

I suspect that you think Michael Moore could better have spent his focus and resources than on making and promoting "Sicko"....don't you consider that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are giving away so much of their wealth because they regard it as a windfall that they were as fortunate to obtain as they were diligent, hard working, and resourceful to obtain?

Are the folks living in the US with IQ's below mean and other limiting attributes, i.e. with lesser abilities and circumstances than you found yourself with, any less deserving of access to medical treatment that doesn't humiliate them or bankrupt them, than someone living in France....or you.....are able to receive? I'm asking because the main point in your post seems to be that they are less deserving....that you have decided that they just have to put the effort and discipline that you put into getting where you are....in a comparatively short time, too....in your anecdotal example.....and then they would achieve what you have managed.....

What happened to all of the folks who were just as smart and hardworking as Gates and Buffet....not even ten others in the world come close to their material success.....