Medicare pays out $3 for every $1 paid in

I'm shocked -said no one.

The US government (both parties) are running the worlds largest Ponzi Scheme.  It will crash, it's just a matter of when. 

Yeah.. benefits for the elderly.. ponzi

Plus you can make much more of the money you paid in, by investing it yourself.

It's a ripoff, especially when it comes to SS

Both crash when the new money isn't enough to pay the old money. Exactly the same even if it is for a "good cause".

If it pays out 3x what it gets in, and you think you can make more money investing on your own, I'd like to see the investment you made...

Uh, well to triple your investment in 40 years let's say would only take an interest return of 3.1-3.2 %.... 

You can triple your investment in 10 years at about 11.6 % (of course a bit more difficult to find now...)  

But it's hardly inconceivable

Much better than letting the gov't tank for it.

EDIT:  Some would estimate tripling your investment in 40 years could be as low as 2.85%

Oh and finding a good Roth mutual fund at 8-10% is not difficult now.

8% triples your money in 14-15 years.

There was a decent article just a couple months ago comparing how much you put in versus get out for Social Security and Medicare.  The article basically dissects a study by the Urban Institute.

Medicare and Social Security: What you paid compared with what you get

The part I found most interesting was:

The taxes paid by active workers help support today’s generation of retirees — which is a big reason why some policymakers are concerned about the program’s long-term solvency. In 1950, the average American lived for 68 years and retirees were supported by 16 active workers. Now, the average life expectancy is 78 and just three workers support every retiree.

By the time today’s middle-aged workers reach retirement age, only two workers will be around to support their benefits. Promised benefits will exceed revenues by about 30 percent, and there will be no money in the trust fund to rely on.

Thus, Social Security is — and always has been — a transfer system from younger generations to older generations.

"We’re not really entitled to get our money back since we didn’t save it but rather spent it on our parents," said C. Eugene Steuerle, who helped assemble the Urban Institute’s calculations. "Moreover, when ‘things happen,’ like a decline in kids per adult, society has to adjust regardless." 

You're right, except we pay into the Medicare system over our lifetime, so it's a monthly income stream that would have to be invested, not a lump sum.  That will change the investment hurdle dramatically.  

It's not just a good cause. If medicare were to "go away" and the elderly were unable to have access to affordable healthcare, several things will happen. 

off the top of my tiny brain I consider:

1) They die. Bye mom, bye dad, bye affordable preventative care, which also means  more of bye mom, bye dad.. Age of death goes back to 68 from 78. 

2) Our  hospital ER's will get overwhelmed by that hoards of elderly that will have to go there. I think hospitals still have to treat patients whether or not they are able to pay the.. God knows how much that costs. 

3) there goes any help whatsoever parents are going to be able to give their kids. And kids will be overwhelmed by their parent's medical bills? If you don't have kids that care, your screwed. Is anyone going to give them heath insurance? 

4) The government will maybe find a way to continue a system that is one of the BEST investments in society that has ever been in American history. In my humble opinion. 

Yes most definitely.  You would need to be diligent in taking what would have been a tax payment from every check and invest that bi-weekly or monthly, etc.
Sorry, didn't mean to imply the lump sum option.

You would also be reinvesting the interest earned.  By doing this, the money available would dwarf medicare and SS.

However, most people would not be disciplined enough to do it.  So it's got problems... 

I'm wondering, what private industry will be willing to provide affordable healthcare to the elderly? Even if I quintupled my savings, one hospital stay basically wipes me out. 

I think you're missing the point.  It's not a matter of Medicare being needed or for a good cause or what the results are if it goes away.  The issue is that the current system is so horribly broken that it IS going to fail if it's not changed quickly.  It is a Ponzi scheme, by definition, and it will fail for the same reasons that all Ponzi schemes fail.

The current politicians just keep throwing more and more money at it to patch up the shortcomings by taking on more and more debt.

I know there is no easy answer and its certainly a complex issue. 

Personally I'm a big fan of choices, but I completely recognize that a huge chunk of people would make bad choices if given the chance.  I kind of like the idea of setting up something like Medicare & Social Security 401k type accounts that take the mandatory taxes already being collected and put it in an account that people can choose their investment.  The choices would be similar to a 401k with 10 or 20 conservative mutual funds to pick from and every person could see exactly what's in the account and it would be a true savings account versus the generational redistribution we have today.

The main reason I like this type of program is that the government couldn't touch the funds.

I'm probably being overly simplistic, but I am smart enough to recognize what we're doing today is not working.

Blame the sequester...really?  While doctor salaries stay the same, drug company profits stay the same, hospital and clinics continue to make record profit?! 

Everyone should adjust in some way to make the system work.  The problem is...make the system work for who?  I discussed that with my neighbor a couple days ago - he's chief of oncology for a very large hospital group here in Detroit. It's a case of 'someone's gotta lose, let's not be the first to blink, or it will end up being us'. 

The only people getting a haircut here are the patients, precisely because they have no choice, which is sad. 

ETA: The fact that this news release came from the Washington Post screams 'lobbyist' behind it. Sounds like someone in the economic equation isn't all that excited about their loss of revenue. Be interesting to learn who it was. 

Medicare pays significantly less than half of the cost of treating cancer patients and cancer centers are not allowed to bill the patient for the shortfall.  The rest of the money comes from cost shifting and from charity foundations.  You would expect to be paid for the work you do, why are hospitals and doctors any different?  You are, however, right; it will be the patient that pays when you put cancer centers out of business because they are not reimbursed for even the cost of the care they provide.

<soapbox>

The true irony is the "solution" to the problem is really the "cause" of the problem.  Many years ago I took Economics in College and we had a whole chapter on healthcare insurance in America and how it was doomed to failure purely from an economics standpoint.  The textbook was very prophetic.

Strip away all the emotions, greed, and needs and just look at it from an economics standpoint.

Healthcare costs are strictly set by the laws of supply and demand but the demand is far skewed because the actual price is hidden from the entity creating the demand (the consumer).

If I have to pay all of my healthcare out of pocket my demand is very low.  I tend to only go to the doctor when I really need to go to the doctor, or it's an emergency.  However, with my insurance plan which is employer paid or someone on medicare with free medical the demand is almost infinite.  So, with the falsely skewed demand the supply side gets hammered and is forced to raise prices which would normally slow down the demand.  However insurance companies have just paid the higher rates and raised premiums to mask the decrease in supply.  Therefore the costs of healthcare have just spiraled higher and higher.  Now the person who doesn't have insurance is unable to pay for healthcare because the prices are way too high for anyone who doesn't have insurance.

So, now to "fix" the out of control healthcare costs we're going to give all the people who couldn't afford healthcare before free insurance.  So, as a result of throwing another massive pool of infinite demand consumers at the already limited supply there is only one thing that's going to happen and it's going to be a massive increase in healthcare costs.   It's not politics, or greed or anything else.  It's well proven economic science.

The real solution is similar to what Dr. Carson said during the National Prayer Breakfast which is to shift everyone to an HSA style insurance program.  If we did away will all the PPO's HMO's and other copay style insurance programs that create too much demand and moved to an out of pocket model for the first $3k or whatever amount for everyone and insurance above that it would seriously fix almost everything.  Then you could implement a government program to pay the premium and deposit money into the HSA account for poor people which would be 100 fold cheaper than Obamacare.

</soapbox>

Bingo, we have a winner.  Third party payers, whoever it is, have made it to where people believe you do whatever it takes, whatever the cost, when it comes to healthcare.