I'm quite aware Medicare is not fully funded through payroll taxes, thank you though. The claim wasn't that FICA entirely pays for Medicare. The claim was that Medicare is a benefit you receive for paying FICA. That claim is 100% true. You pay FICA for ten years, you get Medicare.
That was not your original claim. Your claim was that my statement that states paid into Medicare was false. While that actual statement of mine was, provablely, correct; I admit it was minor. At the same time, I have also proven that FICA is a minority contribution to Medicare funding
FWIW, the state portion of Medicare are payments for people who are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid, essentially a reimbursement.
Not relevant. Money is fungible, so it's still paid for by taxpayers, and in this case via state funds as opposed to FICA.
I think you might have missed this from a prior post of mine after the last time you moved the goal posts:
You brought up the the 15% FICA tax as the amount you would like to keep, so that's the number I used. So those are your assumptions, not my assumptions.
Again, if you compare apples-to-apples,
To compare apples-to-apples, you would have to include all funding sources for Medicare; including your taxes (or the next generations' taxes, via the national debt; another reason Millenials hate SS) as well as any premiums or co-pays you would have to contribute once you are on Medicare. Did you do that, I wonder?
that is, look at what you get in return for paying FICA, primarily Social Security, Medicare, the disability benefit, and the survivor's benefit, FICA is not a bad value. I know this because I've done the calculation of estimating what saving that 15% would grow to by age 65. And then comparing that number to what an inflation adjusted annuity and medical insurance might cost (I used age 64 for medical insurance because new policies for people over age 65 are quite rare). Again, apples to apples.
Again, we have already established that 15% doesn't cover the costs, so while it might be a value for you, that's only because someone else is subsidizing you via other present and future taxes. So if we were to consider the possibility that all the taxes, from every source, as well as premiums & copays later, into the calcualtions (under the assumption that all those taxes could be diverted into your savings) what would that look like? If that 2.9% that goes to Medicare is only 38% of the total funding, than one shortcut would be to increase that to 7.73% (2.9 / .38), thus increasing the total percentage of income by an additional 4.83% (7.73 -2.9), bumping our total to 19.83% (15 + 4.83) of gross income. How would that affect your comparison?
I just used this calculator...
http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/save-million-calculator.aspxTo work out, using my actual current 19.83% income (which is a bit unfair, because I haven't always made so much) from aged 20 to 67, using a modest 5% average gain above inflation, to result in over $4 million
in current dollars. In order to get a 100% return on that number from my actual estimated SS & Medicare after 67, I'd have to live to about 194. Granted, there are a lot of things wrong with my method, but there would have to be a lot more for SS & Medicare to be a victory. Even if I averaged half my current income, which I haven't, I'm over $2 million by 67. I imagine I could replace both SS and Medicare with that, even on the private insurance market.
By the way, your claim that mutual insurance companies pay out greater than 97% of dollars in benefits is complete bullshit. Even the best health insurance companies only pay about 85%.
I didn't claim that they all did it, or even that they maintained it, only that it has actually happened. And it has. MassMutual has done it, fairly well, for decades.
(
https://www.massmutual.com/about-us/news-and-press-releases/press-releases/2014/11/massmutual-approves-historic-$1-billion-dividend-payout-for-policyowners)
New York Mutual & Ohio Mutual both did it on a regular basis when they were still both actual mutual insurance companies, and not stock companies. The key is that mutual insurance companies are *owned* by their policy holders, so the only overhead, on net, is due to the employees and regular business infrastructure of the company; the same kind of overhead that both Medicare and the Social Security Administration must maintain.