I’m sure Medicare provides a tremendous service to the majority of our elderly and disabled population, but it’s certainly not the slam-dunk plethora of governmental generosity I long assumed it was.

Evidently, I was clueless in the belief that Medicare, much like Social Security, is an overall program that draws money from a person throughout his or her life for financial protection without charge in their latter years.

But, Medicare and Social Security are the same thing. Not identical, of course, but the Medicare Act, enacted in 1966 under the guidance of President Lyndon Johnson, merely is a health amendment pinned to the Social Security Act of 1935. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was the mastermind of that.

To pay the tab for Social Security, taxes extracted from nearly everyone’s payroll are gathered in the national treasury, and in 1940 Ida May Fuller became the first recipient of a Social Security benefit check. Hers amounted to $22.54.

Additional checks have been cut since then. In fact, in 2013 the feds spent $1.3 trillion paying Social Security benefits.

Of course, the U.S. Government, like they did with Social Security, quickly devised a plan to pay for Medicare insurance as well. For Medicare A coverage — hospital coverage — it’s the same payroll taxes hardly holding they’re own trying to meet the burden of Social Security debt. What’s called general revenue and patient premiums are asked to finance the other Medicare programs, including doctor care and pharmacy.

That’s where my rudimentary knowledge of Medicare had gone astray. I had no idea that I’d need to pay cash to buy health insurance.

I now learn that Medicare never was designed to be a self-sufficient program. And the gap away from reality is expanding quickly.

The good news is that economists calculate Medicare debt with a crazy formula. Instead of determining what that debt is today, it’s calculated on a 75-year time line to approximate “unfunded benefits” that, in total, will be paid to beneficiaries during the next 75 years. Staggering, I know, but that estimated total of $38.6 trillion calculates to nearly $330,000 to every U.S. household in the 2010 census.

But if we’re going to introduce numbers beyond our comprehension, how about inserting a thought or two about the monetary cost of wars this country has fought since its inception?

As a side-note, the national debt has gone up $10 trillion since 1981 and has increased 400,000 percent since the Federal Reserve Board became an entity in 1913, but blaming the debt on banks and the Federal Reserve Board straggles into the black void of the unknown.

The financial impact of wars, however, is far-reaching.

And that’s nothing new.

When the first U.S. debt calculation was made by Alexander Hamilton in 1790, our nation already was $75 million in the hole. Having no authority to assess taxes, volumes of Continental Congress money was printed with no backing. That debt when Continental dollars failed almost was gone before the government had to borrow heavily to finance the War of 1812.

Then came the Civil War, and a $65 million national debt hiked to $2.76 billion in six years.

But at the end of World War II a new federal policy was instituted and not since has a serious effort been made to lower the national debt.

You’d think a day might come when our creditors would pull the plug and quit investing in a nation without payback capabilities, but maybe not. It might take someone pretty smart to pull that plug or, if you believe in the domino effect, someone pretty foolish.

Jabberwock II columnist Rocky Wilson is a reporter for the Chieftain.