“Saving Medicare From The GOP, Again”: Raising Medicare Age Won’t Save Money But Will Cost Lives
Raising taxes on the rich alone won’t close the deficit or erase the national debt, as Republicans superciliously inform us over and over again. But in their negotiations with the White House to avert the so-called fiscal cliff, Congressional Republicans seem obsessed with a change in Medicare eligibility whose budgetary impact (when compared with ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy) is truly negligible — but whose human toll would be immense.
That Republican imperative is to raise the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67.
Why do Speaker John Boehner and the Republican majority in the House so badly want to put Medicare out of reach of elders younger than 67? It will be costly to their most loyal voting constituency among older whites. And it won’t save much money, according to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation’s latest study – which shows that the estimated $148 billion in savings over ten years is largely offset by increased insurance costs, lost premiums, and higher subsidies that will be paid as a consequence. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities offers an even more stringent analysis, which shows that raising the eligibility age in fact will result in total costs higher than the putative federal savings — which amount to around $50 billion over ten years. Contrast that with the savings achieved by ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which amounts to well over $1 trillion during the same period — and it becomes clear which party wants to reduce deficits.
Assuming that the savings are mostly mythical, the only sensible assumption is that Republican politicians and financiers simply hate Medicare, a highly successful and popular federal program that the right has been trying to destroy, with one tactic or another, ever since its establishment in 1965. They don’t really care whether their alleged solutions save money or improve efficiency. They want a privately-funded medical system that preserves profits rather than a system that improves and expands health care, as Medicare has done for almost half a century.
What the Republicans evidently desire most in their “reform” crusade is to exacerbate inequality among the elderly – because that is the only assured outcome of their plans.
The impact of raising the Medicare eligibility age by two years will fall most heavily upon older African-American and other minorities, as they are still known. The projected damage is summarized clearly in a chart posted on Monday by Sarah Kliff at the Washington Post’s Wonkblog. The number of uninsured among the elderly will be increased for all groups, but the greatest increase will be among minorities, who will also become more likely to postpone medical care because they lack coverage. The net effect of those changes, to project from what we already know about people who lack of insurance and postpone care, will be earlier deaths and much suffering.
Even more broadly, delaying eligibility is a direct assault on the standard of living of working-class Americans, especially those who have earned their way through physical labor. By age 65, people who have spent decades engaged in hard physical work – as firefighters, nurses, or other first responders, to consider the most obvious examples – are ready to stop working. Medicare is a critical element of their ability to retire, but Washington elites, especially on the right, are obtusely unsympathetic to their conditions.
It is up to the Democrats in Washington, especially President Obama, to protect Americans from such policy proposals, which are economically idiotic and socially inhumane. For there is one objective that the Republicans would certainly achieve if they induce the President to accept, or worse, propose, any such plan: They will discredit his second term before it has begun.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, December 11, 2012
“The Austerity Trap”: What Raising The Medicare Eligibility Age Really Means
After a campaign in which Republicans attempted to pillory Barack Obama for finding $716 billion in savings from Medicare (via cuts in payments to insurance companies and providers but not cuts to benefits), those same Republicans now seem to be demanding that Obama agree to cuts in Medicare benefits as the price of saving the country from the Austerity Trap, a.k.a. fiscal cliff. Oh, the irony! You’d almost think that they weren’t really the stalwart defenders of Medicare they pretended to be.
And there are some hints that the Obama administration is seriously considering agreeing to raise the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 as part of this deal. It’s a dreadful idea, and as we discuss this possibility, there’s one really important thing to keep in mind: Medicare is the least expensive way to insure these people. Or anybody, for that matter. In all this talk of the bloated entitlement system, you’d be forgiven for thinking Medicare was some kind of inefficient, overpriced big government program. But the opposite is true, and that’s why raising the eligibility age is such a dreadful idea.
Raising the eligibility age saves very little money, on the order of a few billion dollars a year. That’s because the 65 and 66-year-olds will have to get insurance somewhere, and many of them are going to get it with the help of the federal government, either through Medicaid or through the insurance exchanges, where they’ll be eligible for subsidies. However, since many Republican-run states are refusing to expand Medicaid in accordance with the Affordable Care Act, lots of seniors who live in those states will just end up uninsured, which will end up leading to plenty of financial misery and more than a few premature deaths. Put this all together, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that while the federal government would save $5.7 billion a year from raising the eligibility age, costs would increase by more than twice in other parts of the system—for the seniors themselves, employers, other enrollees in exchanges who would pay higher premiums, and state governments.
What we’d be doing is taking people off Medicare, the most efficient and inexpensive option for them to have insurance, and putting them into the individual market, which works less well and costs more. When we start talking about this in more detail, that’s what Republicans should really be forced to address.
If you want more details on the implications of raising the eligibility age, you should be reading Jonathan Cohn and Sarah Kliff. But it’s important that we keep the big picture in view as the Austerity Trap deal takes shape. If anything, we should be putting more people on Medicare—that would save money and improve health in the system overall (you may recall that when the ACA was being debated one of the proposals was to allow people over 50 to buy in to Medicare, an idea we should bring back). There’s an argument being made that raising the eligibility age may not be a good idea, but the administration has to give Republicans something, and it’s not that big a deal. If that’s the case that wins the day, we should be clear about exactly what it means: a more expensive health care system, exactly the opposite of what everybody says they want.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 10, 2012
“Incentivizing Incarceration”: Court Again Strikes Down Florida Attempt To Privatize Prison Health Care
A Florida court has ruled for the second time that the state Department of Corrections improperly circumvented the legislative process to privatize prison health care. Last October, some state legislators had attempted to privatize the state’s prison health care by folding the funding into budget proviso language. That attempt was held unconstitutional by a Florida judge, who said the legislature could only do so through a separate bill. The legislature then proposed a separate bill in February 2012 that, unsurprisingly, could not garner enough votes to pass.
But that failure wouldn’t satisfy legislators bent on outsourcing the state’s prison health care to private corporations. This time, they were able to include in the legislature-reviewed appropriations bill funding for private prisons in one South Florida region. Seeking to also privatize prison health care in three other regions, the Department of Corrections sought additional funding from the state’s Legislative Budget Commission rather than the full legislature. The LBC granted funds for all four regions and increased the budget from 41 million to 58 million — a move also struck down by Leon County Judge Jackie Fulford:
Whether to privatize some or all of the state’s prison operations is a significant policy decision. Under existing law, the legislature weighs in on this policy decision through its appropriations power. Where, as here, there is no specific appropriation for privatizing health services in Regions I, II or III, it cannot be said that such a significant action has been approved or authorized. […]
Authorizing and funding privatizing health care services in Florida’s prisons is the prerogative of the full legislature and not that of the Legislative Budget Commission.
Even at the time of the vote, some members of the Legislative Budget Commission questioned the legality of expanding funding for private prison health care. But the state nonetheless entered into a contract with Corizon Healthcare to serve those three regions, and forged ahead with notices to nearly 2,000 state workers who would be laid off as a result of the move.
Privatization of health care for nearly 100,000 inmates was billed as a way to cut costs, in part because prison officials anticipated the private companies would offer less benefits to their workers. But studies in other states have shown that private prisons actually cost the state more, while enabling “inhumane” conditions and prompting allegations of preventable deaths. Privatization of the prison system has also incentivized private corporations to lobby for policies that incarcerate more Americans. The United States already has the world’s highest incarceration rate.
By: Nicole Flatow, Think Progress, December 7, 2012
“Blue Light Special”: Walmart To Pass More Of Its Costs On To Taxpayers
The nation’s largest private employer, Walmart, has announced that beginning in 2013 it will begin drastically reducing the number of new hires who receive health insurance coverage, according to The Huffington Post.
The retail giant surprised many by supporting the drive for universal health care in 2007 and then the employer mandate in 2009.
However, its planned policy of not offering new employees health insurance if their hours dip below 30 a week indicates that they intend to take advantage of Obamacare’s new obligation to provide coverage for those who cannot afford it. And with several Republican governors promising to deny the funds for Medicaid expansion, the new policy could lead to a swift increase in the uninsured.
In several states, Walmart tops the list of employers whose employees seek government-funded health care and food assistance for their families, forcing taxpayers to subsidize its low prices and low wages.
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich points out that despite the incredible wealth of Walmart’s primary stockholders, the Walton family, its employees earn wages that may not even keep them out of poverty.
“The average Walmart employee earns $8.81 an hour. A third of Walmart’s employees work less than 28 hours per week and don’t qualify for benefits,” Reich wrote in one of his recent columns encouraging the retail giant’s employees to organize. Across the country a small percentage of Walmart’s employees walked out on Black Friday, protesting the company’s alleged retaliation against workers who speak out for better working conditions.
“Organizing makes economic sense,” Reich wrote.
In 2006, Walmart responded to criticism by greatly expanding the number of employees to whom it offered health insurance. They reduced the number receiving coverage in 2011.
“This is another example of a tremendous government subsidy to Walmart via its workers,” Nelson Lichtenstein, director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara told The Huffington Post.
This change in policy will push the number of employees without benefits closer to one half.
Critics have said that Walmart provides a huge benefit to poor consumers by multiplying the value of food stamps with its low prices. But to Doug Henwood, that argument misses the central problem with the impact that Walmart has had on our economy:
And, yeah, it’s nice that Walmart has been able to provide a working class facing at best stagnant wages with lots of cheap stuff, but Walmart has itself had no small effect on dragging average wages down. It’s not just that they’ve been an inspiring business model for the rest for corporate sector, impressed by the chain’s growth and profitability. That’s led to endless rounds of outsourcing and speedup. But also by lowering the cost of reproduction of the working class, to use the old language, they’ve made it easier for employers to keep a lid on wages.
Add into the equation that taxpayers are subsidizing the costs of these wages and you have a formula for a permanent underclass underwritten by a government that can do little else than providing basic health care and sustenance.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, December 3, 2012
“It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way”: Walmart Plans To Deny Health Care Benefits To New Employees
Why the ACA can’t kick in soon enough, part the infinite: the Huffington Post is reporting that, according to a new policy that will take effect in January, Walmart will begin denying health insurance to new employees who work less than 30 hours a week. It will also reserve the right to cut health benefits for certain groups of current employees who work less than 30 hours. Walmart workers, like many retail employees, often have shifts and hours that vary from week to week, according to seasonal business cycles, so even workers who are currently working 30 hours or more could be affected.
Let’s not forget that Walmart is the nation’s largest private employer, so this change is hugely important. And it’s important not only in itself, but in the spillover effect it could have on the employment policies of comparable retailers.
The Huffington Post observes that the point of the new policy is to opportunistically take advantage of certain aspects of Obamacare:
Among the key features of Obamacare is an expansion of Medicaid, the taxpayer-financed health insurance program for poor people. Many of the Walmart workers who might be dropped from the company’s health care plans earn so little that they would qualify for the expanded Medicaid program, these experts said.
“Walmart is effectively shifting the costs of paying for its employees onto the federal government with this new plan, which is one of the problems with the way the law is structured,” said Ken Jacobs, chairman of the Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
This is yet one more example of why last week’s historic worker protests against Walmart were so important. I’ll add this reminder: it doesn’t have to be this way. Some highly profitable players in the retail game which are comparable to Walmart, such as Costco, manage to treat their workers decently. The reason Walmart runs its business in such a reprehensible manner is because it actively chooses to do so.
By: Kathleen Grier, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 2, 2012
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