Following up on my post on how raising the eligibility age for Medicare will make seniors pay more for it, let me also add that raising the eligibility age will also make the rest of us pay more for insurance too.
You see, then you take the healthiest (ie youngest) people out of the Medicare pool and put them in with the rest of us, you make that pool worse off, too. Those people will now be the unhealthiest (oldest) people in the non-Medicare pool. This will not only raise the cost per person for Medicare, as I pointed out before, but it will raise the per-person cost for health care for the rest of us, too. How much?
[T]he study projects that the change would raise premiums by about 3 percent both for those who remain on Medicare and for those who obtain coverage through health reform’s new insurance exchanges.
Don’t forget that seniors who stay in job-based risk pools will also make them unhealthier, and more expensive, too.
Why again is this a good idea?
