Data for Progress unsurprisingly has some interesting data on widespread support for Medicare for Kids.
First off, the proposal is very popular-and not just with Democrats.
whether or not Medicare-for-All ultimately comes to fruition, there is one logical place to start expanding coverage: America’s children.
Recent polling by Data for Progress found broad popular support for Medicare for Kids. Fifty-four percent of those surveyed support the idea, while just 27 percent are opposed. Among registered Democrats, Medicare for Kids is a no-brainer, garnering 80 percent support, including 60 percent who strongly support the idea. Medicare for Kids also has majority support (52 percent) among independents. And it has particularly strong support among African-Americans, who back Medicare for Kids by a 50 point margin.
Secondly, it’s cheap and easy to implement on the existing health care system.
For some perspective, over 40 percent of all American children are already covered by public health insurance programs. The rest could be covered at relatively little cost because they are generally cheap to insure: children make up a quarter of the U.S. population, but generate less than 12 percent of total health care spending.
Despite how cheap they are to insure, kids, especially younger ones, are incredibly expensive to insure privately. This is one of the big costs for my god daughters parents. A few thousand more a year in health care deductions. Right now in my job, it is 3x as expensive to go on a family plan than an individual one.
This would be an easy and popular way to get healthcare to more people while driving down middle class expenses. It would be more politically popular and easier to implement than Medicare for All. It would also put the GOP on the defensive.
I’d support this. Chip away at the private insurers bit by bit. While we’re at it, lower the age of eligibility for Medicare to 60. As I can tell you from personal experience, there are many of us who get “downsized” from our former jobs once we hit 60 and replaced by younger, cheaper workers. Giving us the advantage of not needing health insurance from an employer will make us more attractive on the labor market.
While I am here……life expectancy has now dropped for the third year in a row. Republicans and too many Democrats, supported raising the age of eligibility for Social Security to 67 and some want to raise it to 70 because “Americans are living longer”….where is the talk (especially from Democrats) to now lower it back to 66 or 64 because we’re now living shorter lives?
Or even Medicare 55. Another win win that could accelerate retirements and open up more jobs to younger workers and make private insurance more affordable.
@ life expectancy and Social Security eligibility at 67:
We talked about this already. The change in life expectancy is a distraction. It is a barely measurable dip caused by a dramatic increase in the suicide rate and in the rate of drug overdose deaths. It is unrelated to social security costs or benefits.
The relevant actuarial data is the expected lifetime of a 65 year old today versus in 1970, That continues to increase. The other rub is the ratio of workers paying Social Security taxes to retirees collecting Social Security benefits. That ratio is going down as a result of several simultaneous demographic trends:
1. The baby boom is starting to become eligible for SS benefits
2. Retirees are living longer
3. There are fewer jobs for young people and those jobs pay less. The wage ceiling cuts off the ability to collect Social Security taxes from the small portion of very high income workers.
So the expense side is increasing while the income side is decreasing.
We agreed in our earlier discussion that there are two straightforward ways to solve this:
A: Raise the eligibility age to 70 (or even higher in the out-years, depending on new actuarial data)
B: Remove the wage ceiling on Social Security taxes.
It’s not a “distraction”, its a real live hard number that the typical American voter can understand. You’re trying too hard. Democrats can own this and lower the age by simply pointing to the numbers. No need to get into the weeds. MAGA….say what you will a,ong with Scott Brown’s barn jacket and pickup truck, but simple messages work.
@”It’s a real live hard number that the typical American can understand”
The “real live hard number” we’re talking is meaningless — a change of just over one tenth of a percent. We are talking about the difference between 76.7 years in 2016 vs 76.6 years in 2017. A suggestion that this is relevant to Social Security costs or benefits demonstrates a lack of understanding about this number.
@”You’re trying to hard”:
You’re misusing a statistic to drive towards the wrong answer.
You agreed elsewhere that the right answer to raise, not lower, the age (emphasis mine):
The correct message is indeed simple:
A. Collect Social Security taxes from EVERONE, not just low-income workers
B. Delay the eligibility for Social Security
I’m not sure that expanding Medicare eligibility is “cheap and easy to implement on the existing health care system”. I’m pretty sure that both health care providers and private insurance carriers actually lose money on the current Medicare patient base, and make up those losses with higher prices and rates for other demographics.
I think that “Medicare for All” is great slogan — as we learned from the ACA, the devil is in the details.
In my view, there is one inescapable reality: America spends an ENORMOUS portion of our GDP on health care, and an enormous portion of THAT goes into the pockets of insurance companies and executives of health care provider networks (actual doctors and nurses are making less, I think).
A significant contributor to our outrageous health care spending is that both providers and insurance carriers profit from procedures that are safe, often unnecessary, and VERY profitable. I’m talking about MRIs, CAT scans, Ultrasounds, etc., etc., etc., that are performed to “rule out” dread diseases. More and more research shows that these provide little or no actual diagnostic or medical benefit — in many cases, they do harm because of false positives. Insurance companies like to pay for them because they lower insurance costs and raise the volume of cash flow. Providers LOVE them because they are profitable, easy to schedule, and generate fat and stable revenue streams.
So long as our health care system is entirely driven by the profit motive, these abuses will expand.
It is cheap and easy to do this for children. Their coverage needs are more predictable and they are not as expensive to insure. Similarly, the separate expansion to the 55+ crowd would decrease the overall cost for private insurance. It would raise costs on Medicare-one of the reasons that policymakers across the spectrum are proposing price controls and rate setting mechanisms to lower these costs.
Ultimately I think the system we will get will be a hybrid system with the status quo and universal coverage. Basically ACA with a public option for adults, Medicaid coverage for kids, and Medicare expansion for 55+ with a rate setting mechanism for public health spending. That is the kind of plan that can be built on what we have without destroying jobs. It is the kind of plan the voters who want to keep their plans but lower costs would vote for. I think Medicare for Kids is part of that.