Medicare at 50 Act reintroduced

[Pam]

C(-)ris wrote:
Not sure why we would need to extended it beyond retirement age. You should be working till you are 65 unless you have a disability or other qualifying event in which case you would be eligible for that reason.

We don't need to give people who decide they want to retire early Medicare. They made the choice and funding their own healthcare should have been part of their calculations to decide if they could retire early.

You’re not giving anyone anything nor does this only apply to retirees. It’s buying into a healthcare plan. Making Part A available on the market. As with current Medicare recipients, additional coverage is needed. So only part of coverage comes from Medicare.

Your idea that people should be willing to work until 65 is puzzling. Retirement age keeps getting pushed back due to our unbalanced economic system.

[DeusxMac]

C(-)ris wrote:
Not sure why we would need to extended it beyond retirement age. You should be working till you are 65 ...

For the record, "65" hasn't been the Social Security retirement age since 2002.

[rgG]

Sarcany wrote:
[quote=C(-)ris]
Not sure why we would need to extended it beyond retirement age. You should be working till you are 65 unless you have a disability or other qualifying event in which case you would be eligible for that reason.

Minimum-wage workers and contractors who have to buy in to nearly-useless just-for-show high-deductible plans (if they have any opportunity at all for healthcare from their employers) would probably disagree.
And, you never know what plans will be available from year to year and if you will have to switch providers and doctors every year. I could not buy anything but an HMO plan one year, while I was working part time and could not get employer health insurance.
I was FINALLY able to get hired full time. When I had to resign last year because of Covid and my husband's health issues, I had to start paying the full cost for my COBRA plan. It was a much better plan than I could purchase on the open market and it cost less. All I ever wanted was to be able to PURCHASE a DECENT plan at a reasonable cost. It was like looking for a purple unicorn.
I would not have ever expected to be provided medicare early for free, but hell yeah I would have jumped on being able to buy into a stable plan at a reasonable cost that didn't make me upend my life every year with no idea what plan or doctors I might have.

[mattkime]

Its introducing a public option a little bit at a time.

[Acer]

Tell you what, when I hit the early sixties, I might have a nest egg big enough to scale back hours, and would be happy to do so as I reach my 40th year in the adult work force. I'm not interested in working to the grave. But not having access to affordable health insurance means I may still not be able to afford to scale back hours.

[sekker]

DeusxMac wrote:
[quote=C(-)ris]
Not sure why we would need to extended it beyond retirement age. You should be working till you are 65 ...

For the record, "65" hasn't been the Social Security retirement age since 2002.


Interesting, I've been looking at my business' retirement planning software, it still assumes age 65 as the target - and always throws in Social Security estimates, too.

[SteveO]

Health care is a human right. It is not something that should be for-profit. There should be a public option for all ages, period. That said, I realize that b/c of the inherent greed baked into the system despite the fact that polling shows bipartisan support for a public option... legislators are trying to slowly introduce it.

As a self-employed person, I've paid ridiculous premiums for decades now, and with very high deductibles. Thank goodness I can now get on my wife's insurance via her job, but all this should still be free. If we have enough money to annihilate the world 25x over, we have enough to give people decent health care. There are plans that propose a penny or something on top of every stock transaction to pay for all this...and they are viable plans endorsed by leading economists.

[sekker]

SteveO wrote:
Health care is a human right. It is not something that should be for-profit. There should be a public option for all ages, period. That said, I realize that b/c of the inherent greed baked into the system despite the fact that polling shows bipartisan support for a public option... legislators are trying to slowly introduce it.

As a self-employed person, I've paid ridiculous premiums for decades now, and with very high deductibles. Thank goodness I can now get on my wife's insurance via her job, but all this should still be free. If we have enough money to annihilate the world 25x over, we have enough to give people decent health care. There are plans that propose a penny or something on top of every stock transaction to pay for all this...and they are viable plans endorsed by leading economists.

Careful, you might start sounding like a President that wanted Universal Health Care! The last such person who proposed an actual bill was... let me check... I think it was Richard Nixon.

[deckeda]

The Johnson administration had to wrangle votes for Medicare. Our health system was already solidly messed up by the 1960s and an outlier like it is today among so-called developed nations. It was a compromise and of course only addressed one segment of the need.

But ya know what? Once established all of a sudden it was popular. Just like the ACA.

[DeusxMac]

SteveO wrote:
Health care is a human right.

I think this is an overstatement; hyperbole.

"Rights" are things you have inherently and which should not be diminished nor taken from you.

As worthy and desirable as it unquestionably is, health care is not something that you have innately merely because you exist. It would need to be given to you by others.

On a hierarchy of human needs, food would be more immediately essential to survival than health care, but being provided with food is not a human "right".