Ed Gillespie: Romney Would Rapidly Remove 65 and 66 Year Olds from Medicare

Booting 65 and 66 year olds off of Medicare within the next five years of so seems like bad policy--65 and 66 year olds, especially post-retirement, do not fare well in a health insurance market without the Affordable Care Act's guaranteed issue, and Romney promises to repeal that. And it seems like bad politics to.

A very interesting move on the part of the Romney campaign…

Aviva Shen: Romney Adviser Says GOP Would Extend Medicare's Solvency By Raising The Eligibility Age: Earlier this week, Mitt Romney pledged to restore Obamacare’s savings in the Medicare program — a move that would move up the insolvency date of the program’s trust fund from 2024 to 2016. On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Romney senior adviser Ed Gillespie how the campaign would extend the life of the program if the Romney-Ryan reforms won’t kick in until 2023, long after Medicare reached insolvency. Gillespie replied by insisting that a Romney administration would raise the age eligibility to 67:

WALLACE: But the problem is, those reforms don’t kick in until 2023. It doesn’t affect any seniors or anybody close to being a senior. But that doesn’t solve the Medicare part A problem which kicks in in 2016. What are you going to do to keep solvent between 2016, after you have repealed Obamacare, and 2023?

GILLESPIE: Governor Romney supports increasing over time bringing Medicare eligibility in line with the Social Security retirement age … The Congressional Budget Office says assumptions about the Medicare trust fund being solvent through 2024 under the Obamacare proposal is unrealistic….

Booting 65- and 66-year-olds from Medicare would in fact have only modest savings, while raising health care costs across the board for seniors…. The Center On Budget and Policy Priorities estimates [extra] costs [to those kicked off of Medicare] could “total $11.4 billion — twice the net savings to the federal government” in 2014…