Addressing Medicare the Wrong Way

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Joe Lieberman has a plan for saving Medicare:

First, I will propose raising the Medicare eligibility age every year starting in 2014 by two months until it reaches 67 in 2025. So if you turn 65 in 2014, you will have to wait an additional 60 days before you become eligible for Medicare. That’s a small sacrifice to ask for the benefits you will receive from a healthy Medicare program for the rest of your life.

Etc.

I’m not a fan of raising retirement ages, and I’m really not a fan of raising the Medicare eligibility age. If you raise the Social Security retirement age, many seniors still have the option of leaving work at 65 and living off their own savings for a couple of years. But if you raise the Medicare eligibility age, they’re stuck. It’s flatly impossible for anyone that age to get private insurance, so they either keep working or they go without health insurance. Especially given the regressive structure of the life expectancy tables (poor people die at a younger age than rich people), this is just an egregiously punitive policy.

But there’s another problem here. As I mentioned the other day, there are two problems with healthcare costs: levels and growth rates. Lieberman’s plan reduces the level of Medicare spending, but it does nothing to address growth rates. That’s backwards. If healthcare costs keep growing at the same rate they’re growing now, it swamps everything else. If you cut spending a bit without controlling cost growth, all it means is that you’ve pushed your bankruptcy forward a couple of years.

Of course, the problem is that controlling spending and revenue levels is a lot easier than controlling cost growth. So, like the proverbial drunk looking under the lamppost for his car keys because the light is better there, that’s where Lieberman is looking. But in the end, it won’t work. It’s true that we’re likely to need ways to cut Medicare’s spending levels and increase its revenue levels, but 80% of our energy should be spent on reining in cost growth. Lieberman’s plan doesn’t.

UPDATE: Actually, it’s even worse than this. Raising the Medicare eligibility age would probably be bad for health outcomes and, in the end, might raise Medicare costs, not lower them. Austin Frakt and Aaron Carroll have the data and the charts here.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate