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"If the insurance Vampires (and not the cool sexy ones on True Blood) get to dump all of the geezers who are really at a point in life where medical care, expensive, working on geezer medical care, suddenly get dumped on the taxpayer tit, they will only have to cover the (for the most part) young and healthy and the real expensive care will get picked up by the taxpayer."
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You're right, of course. Although, keep in mind even on private insurance other people are still paying for the healthcare of the elderly. That's how insurance works: everyone pays into insurance, and things are paid for as it's needed. Thus, you never actually pay for your own healthcare, you're paying for someone else's, and they in turn are paying for yours. That's why larger pools lower cost, because ultimately there are more healthy people than sick people.
Also, seniors are placed on the taxpayer tit anyway (as you put it) because of Medicare. It's just a matter of making it to 65, currently.
What I worry about is how people will pay for it. Basically, right now we're in a situation where a lot of the people who would be eligible for Medicare (if it's lowered to 55) essentially have lost jobs that aren't coming back. In essence, they're now permanently under or unemployed. Lowering the age down effectively encompasses most of the Baby Boomers, requiring younger people to subsidize them, and they're out numbered by something like three to one. This means that one young person, in their twenties, with college debt, struggling to find a job in a difficult economy, start or raise a family, is now also being asked to shoulder the healthcare cost of thousands (millions?) of seniors or soon-to-be seniors.
Then there is the fact of the Medicare reimbursement rate, which is something like 80% of the total cost... which means that cost will be shifted to those who have to pay already over priced insurance, and/or somehow shouldered by doctors and hospitals.
Things might not be so bad if it goes how it is currently rumored, where you have to buy into Medicare, but what are they going to do with the millions of people who've lost jobs in that age range, but are never going to get them back? I'm assuming they're going to try and subsidize them.
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