In Response to Re: Election 2012 Debate Season : The money for the vouchers still comes from taxes. Just like it does now, you contribute to Medicare from your paycheck. This may help people with questions on Ryan's Voucher plan What the Heck Are Medicare Vouchers? A Rundown On What They Do, How They’re Meant To Help, and Why They Probably Won’t Sample: To see how Ryan’s plan might look in an ideal world, imagine Fred, age 70, who has $10,000 with which to purchase health insurance. He can choose a plan from Aetna or Kaiser or Cigna, each plan with different benefits and limits. His choices would, in short, be much like those most people under 65 have today. While healthcare costs would be substantially covered, there would be no blank check. All of Medicare’s beneficiaries—people like Fred—would be active consumers, using their vouchers to select the firms that respond to their demands. Because insurance firms would compete for customers on price and quality, the rate of medical inflation would go down.   But that’s in an ideal world. For all the superficial attractiveness of medical vouchers, they come with many problems. For one thing, Fred might be in poor health. Maybe he has diabetes and prostate cancer, and he needs extensive medical attention. No insurance firm in the free market would want to cover Fred, when it could instead take on Bill, age 66, fit and healthy and still playing tennis. To prevent such discrimination, insurers would have to be subject to regulations that would set minimum standards for care and ban discrimination against unhealthy customers. Or else Medicare would have to adjust the voucher sum to the risks of different patients, a task that would be hugely costly and administratively complex. Another problem is that if medical inflation were to increase faster than the value of the voucher in the years to come, Joe’s voucher would buy less and less health coverage and his out-of-pocket costs would increase. http://tinyurl.com/97vbdyd
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