Over the past five decades, Medicare has been meeting its goals of enhancing access to health care and providing financial protection against high health costs. But the traditional program’s benefit design doesn’t limit out-of-pocket costs, and the financial protection provided to low-income beneficiaries falls short of what the Affordable Care Act offers to the under-65 population.
For our Medicare at 50 Years series, Cathy Schoen, Karen Davis, Christine Buttorff, and Martin Andersen outline policy options that in combination would modernize Medicare’s benefits, improve health care access and affordability, and greatly simplify the program’s patchwork quilt of coverage.