Philadelphia Reflections

The Segments of Lifetime Healthcare:
Medicare Including Retirement Pearl #1

The Affordable Care Act was announced as mandating health insurance for everyone, but about thirty million people were specifically excluded. The healthcare problems of seven million prison inmates, eight million unemployable, and eleven million illegal immigrants were too specialized to be included in a program which hoped to be one-size fits all. Quite properly, such special outliers would be better handled by special programs designed for their special needs.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is now central to Administration attention, and Medicare may be deemed too hot to handle in an election campaign. Nevertheless, we elected here to discuss Medicare but not the ACA. Retirement, childhood, and how to unify complete the list--pretty much all that's left surrounding, but excluding the ACA, election or no election. That emphasizes what had been evaded or neglected, and avoids direct confrontation with the ACA, preparing for the day when that big gorilla is either confirmed or abandoned. It's obviously too expensive, and it remains to be seen whether it can be fixed, or must be abandoned. In our alternative scheme, all of the lifetime healthcare would be financially connected to a single lifetime Health Savings Account, one account per person, but the delivery systems would remain semi-autonomous. ACA could surely live in peace with the HRSAs, and could even peacefully adopt the HSA approach. That would save money, but the questions left are whether it would save enough to be worth the trouble, and whether politics will allow it. Like the European Union, it's surely easier to describe than to accomplish.

Retirement as a Medical Issue. The news is precarious for retirement funding. We begin with the far end of life, where most health cost and all retirement cost concentrates. While retirement is parallel in time to Medicare, we begin to recognize increased longevity as an outcome of better health. If one is to help pay for the other, they must, in the Medicare case, draw their funds from the same pool. That's Medicare, which most people don't want to change, but is the first thing which must change. Because unchanged it costs too much to leave anything for retirement.

Although the Industrial Revolution brought many lifestyle improvements in the past two centuries, it also brought turmoil. The idea of leisure time may once have been a reward for the upper 1%, but actually, most of the population never dreamed of any leisure time. The novels of the "Lost Generation" after the first World War often revolved around the discovery of unfamiliar leisure pursuits by members of social classes newly learning about such things. The moral, then and now, seems to be that leisure is no bed of roses.

We must assign a reasonable definition to a "decent" retirement, provide for a marginal one, and leave the rest to our own sources of wealth.

The cultural response seems to be that leisure was best reserved for retirement, although the younger generation sometimes rebelled, wanting some of it sooner. In any event, Medicare surely extended retirement longevity. (Overextended it, if you believe it will be impossible to pay for.) After all, retirement is a continuous cost, while illness is episodic. There are ways of calculating costs which depict retirement as five times as expensive as healthcare. But Medicare cost averages thirteen thousand dollars a year and rising. That's a pretty meager retirement, and when you discover Medicare is 50% borrowed, you question how many people could retire on $26,000 a year per person, on public sector revenues. If you see retirement as a couple of old folks, you wonder where they would get $52,000 a year, for thirty years. Add Medicare to retirement, and you begin to get absolutely impossible numbers. There seems no possible way to handle this except to provide for subsistence retirement, plus Medicare, and let everyone find some way to get whatever extra he needs, or defines as "decent". And that defines retirement cost as equal to medical costs when both costs could rise appreciably. The Health Savings Account method of accomplishing this is to put retirement at the end of the financial line, funded by the residuals of the other pearls on the string. You keep what's left. Another way is to retire later, or best of all, find some remunerative way to fill your time and use your experience.

Medicare As a Financial Issue. Medicare is about half paid-for, half borrowed, but it's really totally under water. According to Mrs. Sibelius, about half of Medicare expenditures are supported by the general fund or general taxation. The general fund is in deficit, however, providing some fairness to the description of Medicare as a fund borrowed from the Chinese, although China and Japan combined only purchase 13% of ten-year Treasury bonds. In the event of Medicare default, the main creditor victims will be U.S. citizens. The purchasers may change, but the deficit looks to be permanent. Until deficits are paid off, it will remain true that Medicare provides a dollar of care for fifty cents. That sounds wonderful until it suddenly sounds terrible. Medicare is bleeding money. If you want to know how brutal our government can get, read the section later on, about the Diagnosis Related Groups.

About half of the Medicare deficit is paid as you go, about another half is borrowed; only a quarter of the budget is current revenue from the beneficiary age group.

An accountant might say, Medicare's cash revenue is roughly divided between premiums paid by the beneficiaries, and pre-paid as a payroll tax of 3% on workers not yet old enough for benefits. (About half of this wage tax comes directly from the employee, another half from the employer. We skip over the technicalities that some parts of the program are tied to one fund, other parts to another, and also some are subject to higher income tax). About a quarter of Medicare is paid in advance on a "pay-as-you-go" basis, which is to say some people pay current costs of other people -- they are definitely not saved in anticipation of the contributors becoming beneficiaries, as the term "Trust Fund" implies.

A second quarter is indeed paid and spent by current beneficiaries as Medicare premiums. That is, about half of the deficit is paying as you go, another half is borrowed from foreigners; only half of the deficit is matched by current revenue from the beneficiary age group. Nevertheless, the payers of pay-as-you-go are about thirty years younger than the spenders of it. If we put the youngsters' cash to work for thirty years, what interest rate would it take to grow one dollar into three? The answer is about five to seven percent. For quicker understanding, a few unfamiliar tools are needed:

First and Last Years of Life Re-Insurance By far the best proposal for refinancing Medicare, however, is to anticipate the way science is going to re-design costs. In the long, long, run, there should be very little medical cost left, except for the first and last years of life. We have no idea how long it will take, but that's the direction things are almost sure to be going.

So, phase in a restructuring of funding for both children and elderly first, and then add in the rest of a lifespan, step by step. That way, you first fund an obligation you are always sure to have. Be sure to do it in such a way that maximizes the investment income at compound interest. This might be a project under construction for decades, but its first step would be to begin funding for the Last Four Years of Life, which happens to be an early proposal in refinancing Medicare. Since the reader may be unprepared for the topic, it is considered in a free-standing way, in the next section.

Pay at the time, or pre-pay in advance?> At first, it might seem frugal to have people pay for what they spend; let them pay for what it costs, when you know who ran up the cost. But in the case of birth and death, it's going to be 100%, and the amount of it is a lottery. By far the more important issue is the compound interest you earn by paying in advance. Using the rule of thumb that money at 7% will double in ten years, a life expectancy of 90 should double 9 times from birth to death. That is, a dollar at birth is worth $512 at death.

What's more, 50% of Medicare is reported to be spent in the last four years of someone's life. That's likely to represent terminal care, but it doesn't matter. If you prepay those four years, the rest of Medicare has its cost cut in half. In those two simple statements is found the nut of paying for half of Medicare for $100 -- ninety years from now. It's up to actuaries and accountants to find the "sweet spot", of the most revenue enhancement for the shortest time of investment.

Originally published: Tuesday, July 12, 2016; most-recently modified: Thursday, May 02, 2019