EMAIL SIGN UP!
Most Popular This Week
- Corporate Win: Supreme Court Says Monsanto Has 'Control Over Product of Life'
- How the US Turned Three Pacifists into Violent Terrorists
- Cornel West: Obama 'Is a War Criminal'
- In 'March Toward Disaster,' World Hits 400 PPM Milestone
- Revealed: How US State Department 'Twists Arms' on Monsanto's Behalf
Popular content
Today's Top News
Does President Obama Want to Impose a Crushing Burden on Our Children?
Sorry deficit fanatics, this one has nothing to do with the cost of the stimulus or the deficits run-up during the Obama years. We're talking real money here. We're talking about plans to raise the age of Medicare eligibility to 67.
To deficit hawks everywhere this is a great way to save the government money. Life-expectancy at age 65 is roughly 20 years. Therefore raising the age of eligibility for Medicare by two years would shave roughly 10 percent off the program's budget. (The actual saving would be somewhat less since it is cheaper to treat people when they are 65 and 66 than in their 80s or 90s.) For a program that is projected to cost more than $1 trillion a year (at 5 percent of GDP) in a decade, and even more in following decades, this would amount to real savings.
But the cost of this savings is a much higher health care bill for beneficiaries. As it is now, millions of people in their 60s struggle to hang onto jobs that provide health care insurance or do without, hoping that they can make it until 65 without a major medical problem. This proposal pushes the magic age out two more years.
And there should be no mistake; the cost of insurance for someone in his/her mid-60s is a real burden. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that the cost (in 2011 dollars) of insuring someone in the private sector at age 65 will be $15,500 a year in 2022.
This would be roughly equal to the average Social Security benefit for someone turning age 65 in that year. In other words, for the majority of workers who will have retired by age 65, the proposal to raise the age of eligibility to 67 implies that they will have to spend more than half of their income on health care.
The situation will be considerably worse for the large number of beneficiaries who have pre-existing conditions. They can expect to pay two or three times as much for their health insurance. In principle, President Obama's health care plan should prevent insurers from discriminating based on pre-existing conditions, but the smart money isn't betting on that one right now.
Many, or perhaps most, 65-year olds will qualify for Medicaid, so they may still be able to afford health care. However, the quality will almost certainly be worse, since Medicaid generally provides lower quality care.
This raises two additional issues. Instead of guaranteeing middle-class workers decent health care in their old age, we will be telling them that they will have to rely on a program that was intended to provide health care to poor people. So people who spent decades working as school teachers, firefighters, and in other middle-class occupations will need to turn to an anti-poverty program to get health care in their older years.
The other issue is even more disturbing. By switching people age 65 and 66 from Medicare to private insurance we will be hugely raising the cost of insurance for the country as a whole. Medicare is the most efficient part of the national health care system. It both saves money on administrative costs and is more effective in holding down payments to providers than private insurers.
Based on CBO's analysis of the Paul Ryan plan, my colleague David Rosnick calculated that raising the age of Medicare eligibility to 67, beginning in 2022, would increase the cost of health care to seniors by $3.9 trillion over Medicare's 75-year planning horizon. However, only $1.3 trillion of this cost would be savings to the government. The rest, almost $2.7 trillion, would be the additional cost of providing health care through the private health care system rather than Medicare. (All numbers are in 2011 dollars.)
In other words, the proposal to raise the age of Medicare eligibility to 67 is a proposal to increase health care costs to our children and grandchildren by $2.7 trillion. The idea that this cut is being presented as somehow helping our children is a sick joke that would only be taken seriously in Washington political circles.
The reality of health care costs is simple. We have two choices. We can fix our health care system and get payments to providers down to reasonable levels, as every other country in the world has done. Or, we can protect the insurers, the pharmaceutical companies, the hospitals, and the highly paid medical specialists, and tell people that they will have to do without care.
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
14 Comments so far
Show All"In other words, the proposal to raise the age of Medicare eligibility to 67 is a proposal to increase health care costs to our children and grandchildren by $2.7 trillion."
A 2.7 trillion gain in GDP how else is our current economic system going to continue to grow? The insurance industry is one of the few that can project such rosy future.
And Baker doesn't even mention that further diminished job opportunities for young Americans (who are already experiencing the highest unemployment rate of any age group) resulting from older workers delaying or cancelling retirement (due to Obama's Medicare cuts, Social Security cuts, and escalating inflation resulting from his regressive policies) will cost future generations more than any other aspect of increasing the Medicare eligibility age.
Please don't play the young against the old. That is so wrong and just nasty. It doesn't matter how long any age group stays working in terms of overall employment. Workers are consumers which means that someone has to be employed to harvest the money those workers spend. The more people in the system who have the money to spend, the more gets spent. Your employment opportunity doesn't come in the overall economy because other people leave, it comes when jobs are created because more people with spendable income (workers) are buying.
Jobs don't show up because someone drops money on a store (i.e. tax cuts for the rich). The only reason for hiring anyone is that the store has money coming in the door and the only way to get that money is to hire money harvesters (sales help).
Comparison: The family farm. One family may have enough people to plow, plant and cultivate but not enough to harvest. Harvests normally need to be done in a small window of time while the crop is just right. Take too long and the crop rots in the field. So, the farmer needs help, as in hired help. to bring in the harvest otherwise the crop will be lost. That is the essence of any job creation, on the farm or in retail sales.
Retail sales depend on circulating money, money people are willing to spend.That means money in the pockets of middle to lower class workers. That is where WalMart became the largest retailer in the world. Notice that WalMart never put up yacht stores.
It may be that specific jobs are not open to you because someone is already in that job. But that has nothing to do with age. I've tried to get jobs over the years which, when I got there, were already taken by people, often younger than me or about the same age.
To answer Baker's title question: All Obama wants, as Mr. Fish pointed out in one of his many brilliant cartoons, is "to not piss off rich people." I doubt he gives a damn about anyone's children except perhaps his own.
The right wing scum will not be satisfied until they have reduced the great mass of Americans to blithering obeisant serfs, peons, vassals, indentured servants and slaves. Hey, let's raise the retirement and Medicare eligibility age to 90 since we're all living so much longer. Welcome to the world of limited government (limited for ordinary Americans), personal responsibility (ditto) and lower taxes (for the rich bastards).
How else you gonna fund those corporate welfare programs ?
Obama's political idol Ronald Reagan gave up his dream of destroying social security and medicare and now Obama has taken up the torch and is determined to begin weakening medicare and medicaid. The president is a conservative in liberal dress as any serious examination of his policies will confirm.
We need to go back to the fight for universal, single -payer health care - or Medicare for everyone - from birth to death. It's a proven program, it works, and it is cost-effective. Whatever happened to 'promoting the general welfare'?
Health insurance companies, HMO's, provide Absolutely Nothing with regard to actual health care - they collect premiums (which are exorbitant), take 30% off the top, and then deny care based on their restrictive policy provisions. They do not diagnose illness, take care of emergencies or perform surgery - they collect money and redistribute it according to their wishes. If they do not wish to pay for anyone's care, they (and their lawyers) will find a way to decline payment.
And, the 'actual costs' of the current system have never really been determined - as the numbers the politicians and insurance company execs throw around in no way account for the lost productivity/time at work from millions who have no or poor health care, nor the pain and suffering they, their families and their communities endure.
Somehow or another we MUST keep plugging at universal health care. Mad as hell doctors and Physicians for Univeral Health care are STILL trying. Every chance we get we must reinforce to friends and neighbors how important the need for universal health care is. One other point, if the retirement age is raised to 67 I very much doubt that many over the age of 62 will still be working. They will be laid off in the interests of company cost cutting. At 65 they are most likely the highest paid emplyees so it follows by the time they would reach 67 they would have earned even more while a 25 year old will work for much less and will problably take more crap,and be more naive to corproate games that a hardened 67 year old. No, REDUCE the retirement age to 62 max, Medicare elgiability at 62, and if there isn't enough to fund it stop a war or two.
Why would we think otherwise....?
Yes. Vote accordingly.
The billionaire owners and rulers have more than enough workers to guard their interests here. Thats all they are interested in. Well paid guards in the political system. And personal wealth and security. The pay scale goes down quickly according to the reduction in trust and amount of money being protected. Tax accountants do well. With their factories and resource assets being largely overseas, and the bank accounts being overseas as well, who needs healthy workers? The overpopulation of this planet guarentees a ready supply anywhere of those who will work to get a daily morsel of food to survive.
Thats why the private health system of the US is a protection racket and not a service. The same owners use their industries to cause ill health by poisoning people and the worlds environments. The only way anything different is going to happen is to commence real class warfare on the very rich, and the very powerful corporations. Since US jobs and industry have been gutted, and climate change is here and unstoppable with business as usual, there is nothing left to lose. The wealth inequaltiy is so advanced, that a few people are capable of sucking out the remaining life of the nation, and are actually in the process of doing so. They have absolutely no interest in a sustainable society, or in a fair distribution of wealth, which are the two most important things that need to go together for a democracy. Without them, democracy is just a word.
Wars provide a ready means to brainwash obedience and numbness into the minds of nation, whilst de-humanizing those that might have any fight in them when join the military. The global war on terror with homeland security serves to keep the general population compliasant. To prevent ambitious military, the military system is designed to turn people into killing zombies, and keep them safely away from home, until all hope and rebellion have disappeared. Only the mentally shattered are allowed back into the home nation, if they do not suicide first.
The control over the minds of the population, through media, and with holding of jobs and resources, except to the compliant and lucky, is so advanced, and the population seems so accepting of the way things are, without effective protest, that the design, communication and agreement on the dreams of another world, and the instigation of programs to achieve it, from the bottom up, does not, and cannot occur. To help stop it, US socity is fractured into its states, racial groups, religions and occupational groups, as effectively as an Indian caste system. Therefore there is no democracy in the US, and has not been so for a long time.
"The idea that this cut is being presented as somehow helping our children is a sick joke that would only be taken seriously in Washington political circles."
I don't think they care
when people suffer from this they will say its their own fault because they are lazy
ayn rand was callous to the extreme, they are following her lead
of course she managed to get medicare when she got sick didn't she