Changes to Medicare

[nessab2401]

One of the ways the government proposes to deal with the budget deficit and spending on health care is to raise the age of eligibility for Medicare. Currently the age in which a person becomes eligible for Medicare is sixty-five. With this proposed health option, The eligibility age for Medicare will go from sixty-five to sixty-seven. The way that this will work is beginning in the year 2020, the age of eligibility will raised by two months each year until the year 2026 when it will top out at sixty-seven. This option would help to reduce the federal budget deficits by $18 billion between years 2020 and 2026.
Evaluation:
My evaluation of this proposal comes from the research that I have done on it. As stated in many of the articles that I read on the raising of the eligibility age of Medicare, this proposal makes it so that the seniors that would have been eligible for Medicare at sixty-five will now have to wait even longer. They will have to go out and find a different way to pay for their medical care. This means that they will either gain insurance through an employer, a private insurance company, through Medicaid, or they will go without. According to the Congressional Budget Office website, by 2026, there will be 300,000 more people that might be uninsured under this option and in turn would receive lower quality of care or none at all. The others that chose to gain insurance through a private company or even an employer, will probably have to pay some out of pocket expenses making it more expensive than if they had Medicare.
One of the huge problems with the change in eligibility age comes when an elderly person has to come in stay at a nursing home facility before they are sixty-seven years old. With Medicare they would be able to stay for a maximum of one hundred days and it would be paid for. With this new health option that has been proposed, people who are under sixty-seven will have to pay for their stay inside a nursing home. This means that some people will choose to not go into a nursing home because they cannot afford it. This in turn will mean that those people will not receive the proper care that they need and may not ever get better.

 

[miketx]

Sounds like you want a lot of people to die.

 

[Camp]

Saving will be swallowed up by increased Medicaid applicants and people doing without and ending up in emergency rooms for ailments that should have been and could have been taken care of with routine Doctor visits and medications. Colds and coughs become pneumonia and $80,000 hospital bills paid for by hospitals and insurance company premiums paid for by everyone.

 

[Pogo]

Medicare: Death by a Thousand Cuts