Joe Biden just nailed it
Joe Biden says he’ll lower the age for Medicare to 60. This is a smart first step. Medicare expansion has to be done in stages, and not just due to the influx. Medicare will have to be gradually revamped to focus on health needs of younger folks, which are different from seniors.
There are already a small number of young people on Medicare for disability reasons. If you’ve talked with them, as I have, it’s hit and miss when it comes to their health needs as young people. Medicare doesn’t exactly have a lot of resources for birth control, for instance. Yes, there are supplemental plans to clean this up. But the people most in need of Medicare are the ones who are least able to afford a good supplement.
The smart move is to open up Medicare to age 60, then once it’s stabilized and you’ve fixed any problems that have been created, you look at expanding it to 50, then on down. Otherwise you break the whole system and no one has insurance anymore.
Institutional change is only ever successfully delivered by smart and savvy politicians using sophisticated strategies. There never are any magic wands involved. Always be leery of any politician, on either side, who claims anything big can be done by magic, without a sophisticated strategy, simply because it sounds like a good idea in theory.
