What is Medicare?

Depending on who you ask, Medicare has several different meanings.  This fact has huge implications, as we are about to find out at the November 3, 2026 election process.

Here is my definition of Medicare. It is government welfare, plain and simple.  And more specifically, it is supposed to be only for our seniors, age 65 and above.  What is all this business of “Medicare for All” as specified by Xavier Becerra in his candidacy for governor? When and why did government bureaucrats start talking this way?  Becerra claims he did it 30 years ago when he became a legislator at the California state assembly – Becerra is a fibber. Not only is Medicare NOT “for all” YET, but it is a disguised medical program called socialized medicine, through and through. It is taxation of income and redistribution of a small amount of that yield to the people of the United States age 65 and older in the name of medical care insurance. You and I have been sorely deceived because what is really going on is legalized theft! And we are rapidly finding out via DOGE that most of this harvest has been siphoned off into NGO’s and non-profits so we will never have the opportunity to retrieve much of it.

Medicare is a very touchy subject for our California seniors, and a very worrisome subject for those approaching Medicare age. I remember back in those days when Obamacare was being passed, about 2009, shortly after I hung it up as a Sacramento surgeon, when I became thoroughly fed up with Medicare. I joined the Tea Party, a large group of baby boomers and seniors who were adamantly against Obamacare. Obamacare passed and the Tea Party fizzled out. Hopefully some of you reading this remember what a letdown that was.

What I found out in talking with seniors about Medicare in those days was that they were “ALL IN” for Medicare but as above, vehemently against Obamacare.  They believed that Medicare was special, because Medicare was different from Medi-Cal and Obamacare. They saw Medi-Cal for what it truly was and is, namely bureaucratic welfare fraud. Those seniors didn’t want to be likened to bureaucratic welfare fraud, because they were decent. I don’t blame them for that. 

To think that our out-of-control government would disable lazy, able-bodied, able-minded opportunistic gnomes (or hobbits as John McCain would mockingly call Tea Party Patriots in 2011, a year before John Roberts found Obamacare “constitutional” and six years before McCain voted for more Obamacare in 2017) and pay them tax dollars as INSTRUMENTS of their bureaucrat folly.  

And who was and still is the disabler? It’s the reprobate licensed California physician who went to the dark side for a substantial profit and deemed these people medically disabled and introduced them into the welfare system for the bureaucrat case worker machinery and ambulance chasing lawyers to really get the ball rolling. Do you blame those recipients of Medi-Cal benefits? I don’t.   Who’s going to turn down free stuff?  

And those reprobate licensed California physicians? They are losers! They have absolutely no social skills and could never cut it in private practice. They are envious, small, evil people and their hearts are rock hard. That’s why they are where they are.  

This paper wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t add a paper by an author named Jim Karger, posted July 5, 2012, called “American Medical Care Is Terminal”.   It seems legitimate. I found it in one of those free newspaper boxes in front of a “Mr. Pickle” sandwich shop in Auburn. Great lunch, by the way. This paper never got out there into mainstream media. Whether you believe it or not, I think it’s a pretty good representation of California in the present day.  Even the arithmetic looks pretty good to me. From my experience in being paid by Medicare, I don’t think he is fibbing in the least.  

The doctors of modern-day California are purveyors of disability because they are slaves of bureaucracy.   They do what they are told to do, and they are taught what they are to do by the Marxist DEI academia that permeates every teaching institution in America today! Carbon copy Fauci’s! And the bureaucrat dictatorship is very cruel. Not only can a doctor lose his or her license, but they can get thrown in jail for disobeying the tyrant. That’s how it feels now. 

Our twisted government rewards laziness, as above. Isn’t this the opposite of classical Marxism, where the Proletariat are worked to death thus generating profit for the bourgeoisie?  In this case the slugs (takers of free stuff) are pampered to death at the expense of the bourgeoisie (the capitalists, the taxpayers). The result is the same for the bureaucracy for either Marxism or paradoxical Marxism as in the present case. It’s called government wins all, the people who the government is supposed to be serving lose everything!

Let me give you a little Truth as I see it.  Doctors are supposed to be agents of ABILITY, not disability. My job as a general surgeon was to injure patients to remove disease from them. That injury was accompanied by a period of disability called convalescence.  And that convalescence was absolutely necessary to coach those patients along as they healed, with my helpers, the nurses, back to full tilt health. Let me tell you something else. That coaching was profoundly compassionate and empathetic. Doctors and nurses are gentle creatures and highly appreciated for it. They are all in for the patient. I could easily put myself in the position of the patients I operated on and recognize that getting sick and having to take time off work is detrimental to their income producing ability, and their exciting and purposeful and high quality life. I am very sympathetic to that. 

Ronald Reagan, back in 1961, four years before the onslaught of Medicare in 1965, was an inspired prophet when he warned us about socialized medicine.  He said, and I quote…” In our country under our free enterprise system, we have seen medicine reach the greatest heights that it has in any country in the world.  The privacy, the care that is given to a person, the right to choose a doctor, the right to go from one doctor to another. But let’s also look from the other side.  The freedom the doctor loses. A doctor would be reluctant to say this. Well, like you, I am only a patient, so I can say it in his behalf. The doctor begins to lose freedoms, it’s like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government, but then the doctors are equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him he can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors.  You have to go some place else.  And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.  This is a freedom that I wonder if any of us has a right to take from any human being”.  

Reagan’s father-in-law of ten years at the writing of this 1961 document was an academic neurosurgeon at a major university. He was the adoptive father of Nancy Reagan and his name was Loyal Davis, MD. He was a great doctor, because academia hadn’t yet been interfered with by bureaucracy.  That’s partially why Ronald Reagan was so understanding of the plight of the American physician.

I hope you can discern from the above discussion that Medicare or socialized medicine is not a party line issue. It’s an issue of tyrannical bureaucracy vs. We The People; Democrat, Republican, and Independent. Medicare is a disaster that is destroying America, systematically turning us into a mass of dependent jellyfish without a plan, without initiative, and without hope.

Now I know that some of you seniors are very worried, because Social Security is the only form of savings keeping you afloat. Many others are happy to have it, because you do not have to dig too deep into your savings when it comes to paying your medical bills. For them, Medicare is very comfortable. But just think for a minute. You live in America, and Americans are very compassionate people.   

What if you could make a deal with your estranged doctors and hospitals, now friends, that would list the cost of every single procedure and every single medication necessary to keep you healthy or bring you back to good health when you get sick? I guarantee you that without the presence of the bureaucracy in our hospitals and our doctors’ offices, you will be delighted! Payment for medical services is meant to be very private, between a doctor and a patient, in a FREE MARKET or FREE ENTERPRISE system. And what if we created tax exempt medical savings accounts for everybody in the family? And what if we got rid of the regulatory captured health insurance companies, most notably Medicare in the healthcare insurance system, and the “Fair Plan” in the fire insurance system, and regenerate true catastrophic insurance of all kinds with very low premiums, no deductibles, and excellent claims satisfactions?  

When you realize that socialized medicine or Medicare is a big government parasite sucking every dollar you pay in taxes into its own interest, thus completely destroying our free market economy, and then siphoning its ill-gotten gains off into NGO’s and nonprofits so we can’t get our hands back on it, you must come to the conclusion that I do. It is time for hope and change, not the kind that Obama pitched (communism) back in 2008, but the exact opposite kind of change (capitalism) that Steve Hilton hopes for.  It is now the Trump era in medical insurance; stop taxing and allow Americans to pay doctors directly from their private savings accounts, relieving them from tyrannical control and regulation. It’s time for a STRONG MIDDLE CLASS IN AMERICA. It’s time for common sense, high ethical standards, and Trust in each other. Be an informed and Trusting voter. Vote against Medicare for All. Tell all your friends. Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.