(Snippets from the frontline)
Infrastructure
Society needs roads, bridges, and power to function. Likewise, the human body has an infrastructure requiring vision, hearing, and good teeth.
Physiologic infrastructure deteriorates with age, yet regrettably, Medicare does not cover glasses, hearing aids, or dental work.
Some say it should be payed for by the individual, but these costs are exorbitant. Certainly there is also an argument that Medicare is already financially stretched to it’s limit.
Let me be politically naive and provide a simple solution: Take 0.1% of the yearly defense budget (about $600 million) and transfer it to Medicare for these services. It would boost senior quality of life, improve health, and may ultimately lessen Medicare costs.
Seniors who molded, strengthened, and defended our nation deserve a much needed retrofitting of their infrastructure.
Gene Uzawa Dorio, M.D.
Thank you for this, Dr. Gene — I am one who is hugely grateful for what Social Security, Medicare and MediCal have done for me. In july, I received a complete hip replacement performed by a top notch orthopedic surgeon; I received two weeks of PT and OT at a 5-Star Rehab, and am receiving more PT and OT treatments in my home; an ambulance transported me from hospital to the rehab — I also have a wonderful, fully- certified care giver and nurses available to me 24/7; and I also, being a very low-income senior, live in a Housing Authority senior complex for hundreds of dollars below the current rent rate. I have yet to be asked for even one dollar which I can not pay after meeting my living expenses.
I can only justify this drain on public funds by saying that my husband and I worked many years to contribute to the Medicare and MediCal funds. I can not receive any of the Social Security money I was forced to pay into.
I know that I am blessed, and wish everyone who needs this type of medical care could receive the same. I don’t understand why I can’t receive vision, dental and audio care as well, but will never complain for I have been treated more than generously by the government who does not always care for every citizen this well.
There are foreign-born residents here who have never paid one cent into the social services funds which they take from. They tell lifelong American Citizens how stupid we are to not go after all the freebies they receive, and it is at that point that we Americans discover that they don’t even respect America for the care they are given — they demand free phones, dirt-cheap rent, food stamps, cash assistance, and brag about how they have scammed the system. They even provide room illegally in their apartments for dirty, unscreened people by listing them as their care-givers. It’s sickening!.
We live in a secured, locked facility for our protection, but living among us are drug user-dealers, scoff-laws, the unbathed and otherwise unqualified people who should not be here.
You know me — as as a friend of senior advocacy.
“Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the government take care of him had better take a much closer look at the American Indian.”
~Henry Ford