Thomas Kean Jr. wants young people to pay even more for the health care of rich seniors.
I will try to get through this calmly.
Thomas Kean Jr. is a Republican congressman running for reelection in a highly affluent New Jersey district that the Cook Partisan Voting Index rates as dead-even. Naturally, he has to hold more moderate positions than most Republicans. And he may even need to pander to his constituents’ material interests. That is how politics works, I understand.
But the way he decided to do it . . . one can’t be more shameless. To win your vote this November, Representative Kean wants to remove the premiums that high-income seniors pay for their Medicare plans and dump the cost on young people instead.
He begins:
Under current law, Medicare Part B and D each add the Income Related Monthly Adjustment Amount (IRMAA) surcharge to monthly premiums for seniors with an annual income of $109k or more.
Yes, $109,000 for individual enrollees. Married couples get double the income allowance before they start paying more than regular premiums. Also, these added premiums apply only to Parts B and D, as Kean notes, which are not funded by payroll taxes, as is Part A, but by general taxes and borrowing. There is no “trust fund” for these components of Medicare, which now constitute a growing majority of the program’s total spending.
It is beyond reasonable that seniors with the greatest means in their old age pay a higher share of their own health-care costs. Especially because Medicare, and Part B in particular, is the single largest driver of federal deficits and the national debt.
To Kean, however, means-tested premiums are a terrible crime that must be rectified:
This legislation would eliminate a surcharge on Medicare Parts B and D premiums for seniors making between $109,000 and $171,000 as an individual and between $218,000 and $342,000 as a married couple. This could provide an individual senior with savings of up to $241 per month or a senior couple with savings of up to $482 per month.
That’s right. His proposal would make Medicare cheaper only for those couples poor enough to earn between $218,000 and $342,000 per year. How on earth do they manage?
Then, Kean has the gall to say this:
By eliminating unnecessary Medicare costs, we can help ensure seniors have access to the care they depend on without being forced to sacrifice their hard-earned savings.
First of all, what do “hard-earned savings” exist to pay for? More important, this proposal does nothing to “eliminate unnecessary Medicare costs.” All the health-care services that beneficiaries use will remain. Doctors and pharmacies will still be paid by Medicare. The “costs” of these services would not evaporate. They would be redistributed — in the form of even more debt — from the high-income people who consume those services to the younger and poorer people who do not. Rest assured, the bill will come due.
I can sympathize with seniors who feel as though they have earned their government benefits after decades of working and paying taxes, truly. But they must understand that all the money they paid the government is gone — spent on previous generations the moment it came through the door. Entitlement “trust funds” were always a mirage, an accounting gimmick for marketing purposes, and they’re going insolvent regardless. Not a single public dollar spent on seniors today can come from anywhere else but current and future taxpayers, the vast majority of whom are younger workers like myself.
Demographic trends have screwed us enough already. We’ll be paying for all our grandparents’ Social Security, and their Medicare, and their special tax breaks. The least we ask is that lawmakers don’t make the burden even greater by further subsidizing the richest members of the wealthiest generation in history.
When affluent seniors don’t pay their Medicare premiums, the rest of us have to. But Thomas Kean Jr. just despises socialism, don’t you know.