By Mike Ludwig, Truthout | Report
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(Photo: Maxlkt;Edited: LW/TO)
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This piece is part of Fighting for Our Lives: The Movement for Medicare for All, a Truthout original series.
Every day about 10,000 people turn 65 in the United States, and the number of people over the age of 85 will more than triple by 2050. As a result, the demand for long-term health care services and end-of-life care will surge in the coming decades, increasing pressure on a system that is already suffering from high costs and workforce shortages. Unless policymakers make serious changes to how we fund and operate the health care system, the process of confronting chronic illness and death in the United States could become increasingly expensive and difficult for everyone but the very wealthy.
This isn't just bad news for the aging baby boomer generation, which is expected to increase the number of people over the age of 65 in the US from 48 million to 88 million by 2050. In the decades to come, many millennials may find themselves navigating the current health care system's complicated mix of government benefits, out-of-pocket costs and private insurance offerings with their elderly parents.
Fighting for Our Lives: The Movement for Medicare for All Meanwhile, the Republican plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that passed the House last month would gut ACA provisions that kept insurance companies from gouging older customers and cut $839 billion from Medicaid over the next decade. The bill would increase private insurance rates for older people with lower incomes and leave 5.1 million people between the ages of 50 and 65 without insurance by 2026, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Despite the popular misconception that Medicare covers all of seniors' health care needs, millions of Americans over 65 are also enrolled in Medicaid. Elderly people would certainly suffer if the program saw deep cuts.
The proposed cuts to Medicaid are generally unpopular, and the Republican House bill has slumped in the polls. The repeal effort has recently stalled in the Senate due to deep divisions among Republicans. However, reports now indicate that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been hammering out a compromise on Medicaid behind closed doors, with the goal of holding a vote on a Senate repeal package before a July 4 recess. A repeal is not a given, but it will take a sustained push from those who value affordable health care for low-income and working families to prevent a repeal while the GOP has a majority in Congress.
Amid this crucial resistance, a renewed push has also emerged for the creation of something different: a single-payer system. A House bill for a "Medicare for All" health plan has more co-sponsors than ever among progressive Democrats, and grassroots activists are rolling out campaigns across the country. When it comes to the issue of how to best serve elderly patients, advocates say guaranteeing health coverage for everyone would help prepare the system for an aging nation.
Medicaid and Elderly Americans
"The profit-seeking in end-of-life care is the real problem, and we could get rid of it," said Dr. Andy Coates, an assistant professor of internal medicine and psychiatry at Albany Medical College in New York and a member of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), the group of doctors and reformers backing single-payer legislation in Congress.
Coates told Truthout that many patients facing terminal conditions receive "palliative care," which focuses on treating symptoms of serious illnesses, and then "hospice care" at the very end of life. Palliative specialists consider difficult questions posed by life-threatening illness: What treatments may be necessary or desirable, and what treatments would a patient want to avoid even if they could prolong life? How is the patient managing pain? What does the patient still need to get done in life before they die? Palliative specialists focus on both symptom management and psychological wellbeing.
New strategies for delivering care and reforms to Medicare under the ACA show promise for lowering costs and improving palliative and hospice care by empowering patients to take greater control of their medical decisions. Yet patients with chronic and life-threatening conditions are still bounced between providers and experience high rates of expensive and preventable hospitalizations....
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