The finger-pointing between Democrats and Republicans over who intends to 'cut Medicare' is a distraction from the real crisis: cuts will eventually be necessary. The question for lawmakers is when and how cuts to the program will happen.
The finger-pointing obscures the reality that both parties will eventually have to make cuts to the program. It's a matter of arithmetic. The country has fewer and fewer workers available to fund the healthcare of more and more seniors.
Seniors made up only 10% of America's population in 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law. Today, nearly 1 in 5 people qualify for the program. By 2060, the number of seniors in America will have grown from 54 million to almost 95 million. And the U.S. birth rate has dropped from around 20 people per 1,000 in 1965 to 12 per 1,000 today.
The question for lawmakers is when and how cuts to the program will happen. It would be less disruptive to start planning now rather than waiting for the program to run out of money. We can start by gradually raising Medicare's eligibility age from 65 to 67. That policy alone could reduce deficits by as much as $22 billion, according to the
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