Americans at age 64: Medicare is about to begin , how do you react personally?

In My Humble Opinion
1

This thread is about a major issue in the next election: (Medicare For All)–and how it affects the psychology of the average American.

For those of us who live in countries with normal medical care, the American system is simply incomprehensible.
It seems that Americans live their entire lives in desperate fear of their health insurance.
Insurance coverage is the main factor in many of the most important decisions they make in life:
whether to change jobs, whether to get married or divorced.

But then, magically, something strange happens: this HUGE issue in life suddenly disappears at age 65, when everybody receives Medicare.
And that’s why I’m asking you to explain my first question :

"When you reach age 64–one year away from receiving free medical care for the rest of your life–do you feel a massive sense of relief?
I’m interested in the transition: how does it affect you, and your family?

Assume that you are 64 years old,and have a fairly serious medical problem (say, a bad knee or hip that needs surgery).
It may cost $50 000 for the surgery, so you’ve been postponing it for the past year or two.
Because of the weak knee, your family life is more limited.
You can’t enjoy certain activities as much as you used to;you are more dependent on your family to do simple tasks like taking the dog for a walk.
And now, suddenly you look at the calendar, and see that in only a few more months, you will be eligible for Medicare, and the surgery will be free!

Do you feel a vast sense of relief? Does your family celebrate with you,knowing that the health problem will soon be solved,
and without damaging the family finances?

And now for question number two: What are the feelings of younger people who know you? Are they jealous when they see you receiving for free what they cannot afford for themselves?

A situation like this must happen to almost every family

Everybody has grandparents or somebody they love who is 64 years or older.
Naturally, they are concerned and ask “how much pain are you feeling in your knee?”.
And I would assume that they are happy when you can finally answer:
“I finally turned 65, so I could afford the surgery, and now I feel great” .
How do the personal and family dynamics work here?
You watch your loved one suffer for a year or two, waiting to reach the magic age of 65,
And then suddenly life is good again.
And now question number three: (possibly GD territory)
When politicians offer them this same benefit, why do so many people resist?
After having had the intimate and deeply personal experience (i.e. sharing a loved one’s pain and then seeing it solved, for free)
you now hear a politician offering you the same deal.This is something practical that will improve your life in a very direct way.
Usually in politics people are glad to take whatever they can get, if it affects them immediately for the better.

Obviously, there is the question of raising taxes to pay for the Medicare-for-all.
But those new taxes are still vague and far away in the future, and nobody knows how much they will cost.They don’t affect you yet.
But what does affect you is the immediate, intimate, personal stuff (ie. seeing your grandpa walk again).

As you hit age 64, don’t you think to yourself "wow, it would be nice if Medicare had started already, too bad I have to wait 12 more months.
And at age 63 do you think “too bad I have to wait 24 months.” And at age 62, "too bad I have to wait 36 months, etc.
I’m trying to understand how Americans handle this contradiction in their personal lives:
living with deep, existential worries about health costs ruining their lives, and then suddenly NOT needing to worry about it. It seems to me that the sense of relief would be so strong that I would want the rest of my family to enjoy the feeling of not worrying…without having to wait in desperation for 65 years.

(personal anecdotes welcome. Long political tirades should probably be moved to GD)

2

I’m not 64, but I’m middle aged.

I feel a lot of jealousy of people with reliable health insurance. Not just Medicare, but also medicaid. I know people I went to high school with. They didn’t get an education, learn marketable skills, they got in trouble with the law. Meanwhile I went to college, built my resume, tried to do the right things.

And their medicaid is superior to my overpriced, shit private insurance. I don’t want them to lose their medicaid by any means. But I really hate how people like me who try to do the right thing are punished with overpriced garbage insurance when people who fall behind get single payer medicaid.

Many of the people on Medicare I know are diehard conservatives. They hate government health care as a concept but like Medicare in practice, and want Medicare abolished after they die (akak fuck my kids generation, pull up the ladder after I’m done). I resent that mentality more than anything else. I’m not trying to add a political angle, but it is frustrating and insulting to see it up close. Where is the sense of community?

Also Medicare still costs a lot. You have premiums for Medicare parts B and D. You have medigap premiums. You have co-pays and deductibles. You have health care not covered by Medicare. It adds up.

Overall it averages out to about $500 a month in premiums, deductibles, copays and health care not covered by Medicare for the average Medicare enrollee. That figure will supposedly be $800/month by 2030. By the 2040s when the first millennial retire, even with Medicare the medical costs of that generation will almost equal their social security payments.

Even at five hundred a month per person, over twenty years that is almost a quarter million dollars for a couple who lives to their mid 80s.

3

Q1: I’ve been on Medicare for 2 1/2 years, and my answer was hell yes. And I was in better shape then your scenario. I had excellent coverage, which I continued when I retired through COBRA - which was expensive, but the same coverage. So I could have treated an illnesses without waiting. But my retirement date was strongly controlled by the time I could be on COBRA and my Medicare start date - actually my wife’s, since I had to retire late enough so she’d be covered before she started Medicare.

Q2: My kids had good coverage, so no jealousy. Most people I know have good coverage also. But I see your point.
One of my daughters scheduled her pregnancy so that her maternity leave would get covered since she had started a new job. But at least she has it. She used to live in Germany where the maternity leave is a lot better than here.

Q3: You’ll get plenty of this. I can predict some. The US is different! We have the best coverage in the world! People love their doctors. (I kept mine. And pay less.)

4

I have the best coverage, and it costs me very little. Since I’m retired military, my health benefit from that (Tricare) is a secondary insurance to the Medicare coverage, and it also covers my spouse. The premiums come out of social security. I do pay co-pays on medications. You can hate me if you want to, but I earned that mother. Co-pays on surgeries are covered by the Tricare insurance.

5

Not so fast. Medicare doesn’t cover every medical expense. In addition to Medicare, I have to buy additional insurance every month, and even that doesn’t cover all my expenses. My prescription copays can exceed $1,000/month, especially the cost of insulin.

6

There’s really no resentment of people that turn 65 and can start using Medicare. Yeah it would be nice if we all had that coverage, but that’s the way the system works. We pay medicare taxes throughout our working life to get covered when we hit 65, if we had coverage earlier, we’d have to pay more.

Also, most people are in a pretty stable situation with their health insurance. It usually sucks, costs too much (even the employer-sponsored plans have gotten crazy expensive), and we wish the coverage was better, but we have our insurance plans and we just deal with the crappiness.

That’s why I think a medicare option would be a godsend. Let the private market compete against optional govt coverage.

7

I am in my 50’s, so a long way from Medicare. But I don’t think about it too much. The health insurance I get from my job is fine. Yes, it is expensive, but I would pay a lot one way or another under any scheme. I am a little anxious about the hassle of switching over to Medicare, but its a long time away.

I’d like to see some sort of national health care system in the U.S., for the benefit of my fellow Americans. It wouldn’t help me much.

8

I was very relieved to get on Medicare when I turned 65; but, as has been said in this thread, Medicare doesn’t cover everything. It’s still possible to get hit with medical bills you can’t handle.

Those of you who are happy with your private insurance: have you had serious health problems?

9

It really isn’t that bad, especially if you get a book to show you the options. You will get a ton of ads, just throw them away. The medicare.gov site is not the best one in the world, but far from the worst, and it lets you compare plans pretty well. The worst of it is Prescription coverage which strongly depends on what drugs you add to your list.
When you make a decision, though, you have to be on the phone for about 1,000 years as the nice insurance people read you the stuff Medicare requires that they read you.

10

I’m 57, I work for the biggest software developer in silicon valley, and the only plan I can reasonably take from my employer is an HSA + high deductible health plan. Because I cover my son*, my deductible is $2750, and prescriptions are not covered until I reach my deductible. I always meet my deductible for the year because one of my prescriptions is $300/mo sans insurance. My max OOP is just under $6000, and I meet that too every year so far since I lost my better coverage from this employer three years ago.

Yeah, Medicare can’t come soon enough. That said, I have no insurance-envy of those who have earned this benefit. Just frustration that someone in my situation can’t get a bit of that.

*My other choice is Kaiser, at much less cost, but it’s not available where my son goes to college, so I’m sucking up the high costs for him.

11

You should think about changing jobs. I worked for a big software company in Silicon Valley and my insurance was a lot better than that. With today’s market you should have no trouble.

12

Medicare is NOT free. I wish to clear that up. It does not cover everything and there are co-pays.

13

Okay, I didn’t know that. But isn’t Medicare still the best and cheapest health care for over-65’s? Going back to my example in the OP ,don’t most Americans at age 64 count the 12 months till they will be eligible? And do people at age 62 start counting 36 months?

14

In most cases it’s the ONLY healthcare available for those over 65. One reason Medicare was created was because insurance companies were reluctant to cover the elderly and would only do so at prohibitive prices.

Hell, I’m in my mid-50’s and counting the months.

In some ways Medicare is superior to my current work-provided health coverage. In some ways it is not. One feature I particularly like about Medicare is that it is NOT tied to my working, so if, say, I wanted to drop to part-time hours to pursue other interests, or because my aging body is having trouble handling full time work I’d still have health coverage. At this point I’m forced to work full time regardless of the consequence to my body/health/rest of my life. At this point in time that’s not a problem but I’m all too aware that I’m aging and starting to slow down in general.

15

Yes, our private insurance has covered us for serious health issues.

16

Being eligible for Medicare solves one piece of the retirement puzzle, not free because you have to buy supplemental plans and will have out of pocket. I’ve always been covered with employer based insurance because I’ve never been unemployed with spouse also unemployed so the odds for me to have been at risk of bankruptcy due to lack of health care coverage has seemed remote. So getting to 65 and having health care via Medicare A/B/D nice but not some huge relief.

Medicaid is more comprehensive coverage, but fee schedule very low and many providers do not accept Medicaid for that reason. If Wesley wants to be less jealous of his lower income/no income Medicaid using friends, he should try to get dentist appt or PCP appointment after he tells practice he has Medicaid.

Medicaid is exploited by some with wealth because they put assets in trust as they approach retirement age so that rather than pay for Nursing Home out of assets if they need such care or buying LTC insurance, they arrange to have low assets (set trust up and wait for lookback period to expire) so that they quality for Medicaid to pay for Nursing Home. Here again, (however) it is much easier to get a Nursing Home bed if you are self pay or LTC covered than if you have Medicaid, so their sneaky plan to secure government funding has a potential flaw of less choice, delays in getting bed, settling for crappier institution.

What US needs is for Canada to invade and bring their health care, foreign policy, etc with them.

17

What would a Canadian invasion look like?

“Excuse us - we are invading. Could you please lower the drawbridge? Thank you. Here is cradle-to-grave healthcare, sensible gun laws, dollar and two-dollar coins, and some additional Tim Horton’s. You’re welcome.”

18

You mean “get to pay less,” right? American private health insurance makes our health care the most expensive in the world, by a massive margin.

19

A lot of people anticipating ''Medicare for all" probably have this same delusion.

It’d be quite a shock when they started navigating the Medicare/Advantage Plans/Part D (and other Plan Alphabet Soup)/supplemental eye/hearing/dental coverage maze, learning about “donut holes” and all the other complexities of the system.

From what I’ve heard, it’s horrendous right now if you expect to show up at a Medicare office with questions and concerns, what with crowding and long wait times. It should be a real gas when/if everyone goes on Medicare and enjoys those “lower costs” and “higher efficiency”. :stuck_out_tongue:

20

Medicare is not free.

Medicare part A is free. Well, almost. It covers Hospital in in patient care, but there is a $1,364 once a year deductable for hospital stays.
Medicare B: "Medicare Part B Premium
*There is a monthly premium for Part B coverage. For Medicare beneficiaries with incomes below $85K/single or $170K/couple, the Part B premium cost for 2019 will average $135.50 per month. For Medicare beneficiaries with higher incomes, the Part B premium cost will range from $189.60 to $460.50 per month, based on income level.
*

MEDICARE PARTS A, B, C AND D EXPLAINED:
Part A (hospital coverage): Covers things like inpatient hospital stays, home health care and skilled nursing facility care.
Part B (medical coverage): Covers things like doctor visits, outpatient services and diagnostic screenings.
Part C (Medicare Advantage): Medicare Advantage plans are offered through private health insurance companies. When you join a Medicare Advantage plan, you still have Medicare. The difference is the plan covers and pays for your services instead of Original Medicare. These plans must provide the same coverage as Original Medicare (so you’re not missing out on anything) and can also offer extra benefits.
Part D (prescription drug coverage): Only offered through private health plans.
https://medicarehelp.healthpartners.com/blog/parts-of-medicare-explained/

https://www.mymedicarematters.org/costs/parts-a-b/

So, that “huge issue” doesnt disappear. $460 a month for part B, plus about $50 a month for Part C, plus the same for part D.