Duncan Black:
Jeebus It's Not High School: raising the Medicare eligibility age will cost money, not save money, and also kill people.
Adele Stan:
Political Animal - Medicare Eligibility Age on the Table?: Jonathan Chait['s]… suggestion that despite the fact that a raise in eligibility age would cost the federal government billions and billions more than if the current eligibility age of 65 were maintained, it might be worth trading away to the Republicans in order to avoid the fiscal insanity that is sequester….
But the added cost is not the trigger for the invective; that comes from this: Raise the eligibility age and PEOPLE WILL DIE.
No, that’s not an exaggeration, and the failure of certain wonks to take that into consideration speaks to their isolation from everyday people, even the everyday people who provide services to them…. These are people who cannot wait until they’re 67 for the full complement of Medicare benefits. Many of them are people who will wind up paying the individual mandate penalty in Obamacare, because even if purchased through an exchange, the monthly premium will be more than they can afford….
Parramore:
Life expectancy among the less educated and those with lower incomes has actually dropped. New research shows that between 1990 and 2008, white women lacking a high school diploma lost a shocking five years of life, while their male peers lost three years.
But if everyone in your family is college-educated and has a good job with adequate health insurance, why would it even cross your mind that not everybody does?
Here’s my hope: that this rumor is being floated in order to create enormous pushback from the left that would give Obama cover for rejecting it. Time to push.
Jonathan Zasloff:
Sell-Out of the Century?: I would hardly qualify as the Obama campaign’s most important supporter, but I did give several hundred dollars to the campaign, as well as spending numerous hours making phone calls on the President’s behalf. I did not do this so that the President could raise the Medicare age and retain the lion’s share of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. But if The Shrill One and Ezra Klein are right, then this precisely what the President is intending to do.
If this is true — and right now it is a very big if — then it represents the greatest sell-out of a winning political coalition since LBJ ran on “not sending American boys to Vietnam.”
