How would lowering the Medicare age save the system money?

[Jackpine Radical]

3. I think you would have to do a reshuffle of the entire payment system

to make it save money, and the money saved would have to come out of the pockets of the private insurance industry.

Let's take the extreme example: Single-payer Medicare for everyone. We could pay for this by diverting the money that people (including employers) are now putting into the private insurance plans into the common single-payer fund. This would be done with some sort of taxation scheme. Then you would have a universal pool in which the young & healthy are subsidizing the care of the elderly and ill, but with the understanding that when they are old and ill, a new generation will be subsidizing their care. We are currently devoting about 18% of GDP to health care under our present system (while failing to insure everyone) while other nations are providing much better care for their entire populations while spending about 10% of their GDPs for the purpose.

Unfortunately, you're right in that this would probably be a hard sell in the current social environment. But just give the current dysfunctional system a few more years to piss everyone off, and maybe cultural attitudes will change.