No Free Sex-Changes For You!

Dave Weigel captures the mood of a senior citizen who really likes Ryan's Medicare plan:

And after that, what would Romney and Ryan do to Medicare? They’d keep it for the people who paid into it. Dietrich called the Obama administration’s promise to find $716-odd billion in Medicare payment reductions a “scam,” moving money from a program that worked into Obamacare, which could never work. “I don’t want to pay for anyone else’s health care,” he said. “I don’t want to pay for your health care. No offense—I don’t know you! What I’m saying is that I don’t want to pay for sex changes for anybody. I don’t want to pay for somebody’s cosmetic surgery.”

I am amused by the idea that what people fear most is that their money will go to pay for sex changes. Estimates of how many gender reassignment surgeries take place in the US are hard to come by but some estimates put it at between 0.0025 and 1% of the population.

But we do have good examples of waste from current Medicare users. For example, the Office of Inspector General found that that $5 million was improperly spent on home health services. Billions are estimated to be wasted on Medicare each year.

But I admit that government-covered sex-changes sure sound scarier.

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Noah Kristula-Green

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