If you’ve lived to your 60s and haven’t yet developed a robust hatred of the government, Medicare will likely push you over the edge. I’ve recently started to learn it to help my mother navigate the system without going bankrupt, and OMG, what a clusterf*ck!! Some of you may ask, how could she go bankrupt, doesn’t Medicare pay for all your health care after 65? *Suppressing sad laugh* Uh, no, no, no. You still have premiums, deductibles, co-pays, and all the other bullshit we’ve grown accustomed to in employer health plans. Once you see the potential costs, you’re guaranteed to scream, “WTF did I pay a lifetime of Medicare taxes for?!!”

Private health plans are a mess of complexity and jargon, but they’re comparatively easy to navigate when you dive into the government’s bureaucratic mess. There are four parts of Medicare, each with its own coverages, deductibles, surcharge tiers, and other fun surprises. Parts A and B deal with the majority of hospital and medical expenses. Part D is a patch put in by George W Bush to cover prescription drugs. Part C is a type of subsidized Medicare plan offered by private companies that you can opt into if you don’t want to deal with the original Medicare parts. Then, you have Medigap plans, which is a type of supplemental insurance to pay all the extras like co-pays or extended hospital stays not covered in the other parts.

But whether you get some or all of your covereage from private companies, the government can’t help itself from f*cking up the process. For example, my mother purchased her own Medigap plan. In trying to figure out what it covered, I discovered there are 10, yes 10, different types of Medigap plans (Plans A-N). After I skimmed through the details of each type, I came to the asterick that some states, like my own of Wisconsin, use their own special plan types. 🙄 I could go on about the complexity, but I’m guessing you get the point. I apologize if I’m not describing these perfectly as I’m still trying to get a handle on everything, and much like our tax code, every clause seems to have an exception.

Like most of you, I hate dealing with deductibles, co-pays, and other inventions of private insurance, but I can at least understand the rationale of most items used to keep costs from exploding. But when you get politicians involved, you get the usual hodge podge of political promises, patches, additions, and stupid-ass compromises needed to get bills passed. And since it’s mostly lawyers crafting the sytem, you can be sure it will be an indecipherable mess of complexity. For this gift, this “entitlement,” we have money extorted from us our entire working life. For some perspective, if you took just the Medicare taxes of a person with an average salary of $50,000 and invested in an 8 percent index fund, at age 65, you’d have $750,662. In return, we get to continue paying additional money in retirement to this FUBARed system. Oh, and if you continue working in retirement, they continue to steal more Medicare taxes in addition to the premiums, etc. Isn’t government wonderful?

Blog Link: https://educationdojo.com/articles/2025/06/random-thoughts-on-medicare

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