(Yuri Gripas/Reuters)
Think Progress's Igor Volsky
picks up on a Politico report stating that before talks between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner broke down last Friday, the two had agreed to raising the eligibility age for Medicare.
In what may be one of the most under-reported stories of the debt ceiling talks, Politico’s Jen Haberkorn notes that before negotiations broke down on Friday evening, President Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner tentatively agreed to gradually raise the Medicare eligibility age as part of a "grand bargain" to increase the nation’s borrowing limit:
Details of the plan were not yet finalized before the Obama-Boehner talks collapsed on Friday. But in general, the agreement called for very gradually increasing the eligibility age from 65 to 67 over about two decades, according to administration and Republican congressional sources.
One pathway would call for increasing the age by one month per year beginning in 2017 until it reached 66 in 2029. In 2030, it would increase two months per year until it hit 67.
The administration’s willingness to entertain the idea may have given "a controversial idea more legitimacy and high-profile support than it's ever gotten before," Haberkorn observes, and it is likely to rile progressives who question the wisdom of the compromise.
Indeed, particularly considering the huge cost shift this would mean for seniors (Kaiser Family Foundation estimates [pdf] that it would cost "$3.7 billion in out-of-pocket costs for those ages 65 and 66 who would otherwise have been covered by Medicare" in 2014) for the pretty small return for the government. Volsky points to a CBO finding on the proposal that raising the eligibility age "would have little effect on the trajectory of Medicare’s long-term spending … because younger beneficiaries are healthier and thus less costly than the program's average beneficiary."
All of this, and more, is why some analysts call the plan "dopey," and another "the single worst idea for Medicare reform—which is saying a lot in light of the disastrous Paul Ryan plan for turning Medicare into an inadequate voucher for private insurance."
It's just a bad idea, so I guess we can thank Boehner and his band of crazies in the House for that bullet dodged, at least for the time being.