If we want Medicare to work we are going to have to raise Medicare taxes and premiums.

[thucythucy]

92. How about LOWERING the eligibility age to 55 or 50?

allowing people to buy in on a sliding fee scale until retirement? There are tens of millions of people for whom this would be a cheaper option than private insurance, or who don't have insurance through work, or who continue to work at sucky jobs only because they need the insurance.

Lowering the eligibility age with a sliding premium scale would bring in millions of people who are relatively healthy, meaning low cost to the system, who would pump in cash in premiums, off-setting the current losses.

After all, that's how insurance is supposed to work. People who don't need the service now subsidize those who do, with the assumption that it balances out. The way the system works now, the private insurance companies mostly get the young and middle-aged, relatively healthy, relatively well-to-do, leaving the rest--elderly, people with disabilities, people in poverty who often have health issues related to their poverty--to be taken care of by government programs. Then folks complain about the "high cost" of those programs.

This was actually a part of the AHA for about twenty-four hours, until Joe Leiberman (R-Insurance Industry) said he'd block any such plan.

But that doesn't mean we have to stop trying.