Medicare may be facing some serious financial strain with a huge influx of baby boomers becoming eligible in the coming years
As of Saturday, January 1, there will be Baby Boomer turning 65 years old every 8 seconds and each one will become eligible for Medicare supplement insurance.
This will be the biggest jump in numbers Medicare has ever seen. In the year 2011, about 2.8 million will be eligible for Medicare. Today there are 47 million people using Medicare, but by 2030 they estimate it will grow to 80 million people and that even takes into consideration some deaths.
With the numbers we have now, the government expects by 2020 that the costs of Medicare will be at $929 billion, which is an 80% increase.
This starts to put a lot of pressure on President Obama and Congress to come up with ways to cut back the costs and keep Medicare from financial strain. There are a number of ways to cut costs like raising the age of Medicare eligibility, raising the co-payments or reducing the benefits of Medicare.
Associated Press-GfK recently did a survey in which they asked those eligible for Medicare if they thought they could depend on Medicare as their health insurance plan. Of those polled, 43% said they don’t think they can depend on it, while only 20% thought they could depend on it. The rest don’t have an opinion because they are unsure.
In the poll they also asked if they would like the age of eligibility raised and 63% said no. Then they were given a choice between raising the age or cutting back on benefits, and 59% polled said they would prefer to raise the age.
