Should seniors pay more for Medicare? Republicans think so, and they have repeatedly called for replacing the current program with vouchers that would shift cost and risk to seniors.
There's no doubt this is where Republicans will take us if they capture control of Congress this year, and the White House in 2016. Representative Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who chairs the House Budget Committee, advocates “premium support” reforms that would give seniors vouchers to buy private Medicare insurance policies in lieu of traditional fee-for-service Medicare.
Under the latest version of Ryan's budget proposed in April, starting in 2024 seniors could opt to buy premium-supported private plans or stay in traditional Medicare. Ryan has argued that introducing competition will bring down costs over time, and capping the government's costs does sound like a tempting way to address Medicare's financial problems.
Medicare's trustees project total annual spending will jump 78 percent by 2022, to $1.09 trillion. Much of that increase will be fueled by higher enrollment as the baby boom generation ages.
But premium supports would shift risk to seniors, and could effectively make traditional Medicare much more expensive by siphoning off healthier seniors to private plans. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that this effect could boost traditional Medicare premiums 50 percent by 2020 compared with current projections.
Most seniors simply can’t afford to pay more. If you doubt it, check out the new interactive tool launched last month by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, one of the country's leading healthcare research groups.
The tool analyzes the income and assets of today's 52.4 million Medicare beneficiaries, and how their financial picture will change between now and 2030, when 80.9 million people will be covered by the program. It can compare different demographic slices of the Medicare population based on variables such as education, race, gender and marital status––and here you get a stark look at how economic inequality affects the pocketbooks of seniors.
Kaiser's tool is based on a simulation model developed by the Urban Institute that uses population data to analyze the long-range impact on retirement and aging issues. I encourage you to test-drive the tool (http://bit.ly/1zi5rMq), but here are some highlights:
Income
Fifty-three percent of Medicare beneficiaries had $25,000 or less in annual income last year; half had savings below $61,400 and less than $67,700 in home equity on a per-person basis.