>>b. As we saw during the financial crisis, US government deficits can disappear overnight.

If you have a mechanism to increase contributions without further impoverishing the homeless working people you described, you need to enter politics! Because so far the main focus is on reducing costs, hamstrung by the perverse incentives to increase costs for the non-Medicare insured population. Depress Medicare too far compared to "market" and providers start refusing Medicare patients or seeking out toenail clipping rorts.

>>c.Saying that it exists because my teacher was buying a house when she should been paying more to fund procedures that were unheard of when she started working is a bit of stretch.

Not sure why you keep choosing your teacher who preceded Medicare if I understood your description. Perhaps we can simply agree that it's a mistake to save on initial repayments by allowing deficits to grow to the point where balancing the books is no longer possible. They used to say "a stitch in time saves nine" but leave it long enough and that early unpaid dollar now is more like negative nineteen thousand compounding merrily away for Medicare.