I believe you are reading the chart wrong. This is a break down of the distribution of Medicaid by age. 57% of Medicaid recipients in California are under the age of 26.
And, before you say 50 is old. I know plenty of people who have started businesses and entire new careers in their 40's and 50's. This ain't the 1920's.
None
To be precise, Medicaid is obligated to recover cost of services provided at or after 55 years of age.
OK. Fine.
So CA enrolls twelve million people. Some young some older.
Do these people not age?
Of course they do. So, presumably, they are going to be on Medicaid for a very long time. Maybe their entire lives.
OK. That's established. People age. They think they have health insurance. Yet, they actually don't.
Out of those 12 million roughly 2.2 million were 45+ years old. One million were 65+.
So that 55+ event horizon, we could say, is very close for millions of people being shoved into Medicaid.
In fact, nationwide, about 14.5 million people 45+ were enrolled. Out of those, about 6.4 million were 65+.
These are not insignificant numbers. Source [1]
BTW, these numbers are for FY2011 when we had about 32 million people enrolled in Medicaid. Due to Obamacare and other factors we now have over 74 million and are well on our way to the 100 million mark. Finding current data seems to require a lot of work. You are welcome to do it if you want to be accurate. For now...let's double the numbers above:
45+ 28 million.
65+ 13 million.
So we are looking at roughly 41 million people at or past the threshold for estate recovery. And, of course, millions more that will eventually get there if they don't pop out of Medicaid or if they are shifted back into it because health insurance becomes too expensive.
41 million and counting. All subject to estate recovery or within a few years of it.
I, quite literally, don't understand what you are arguing about.
This is a real problem. People age and live well beyond 55 years of age. My Dad is 90. He had cancer when he was 70. That was 20 years ago. And, like him, millions of people. And most of them don't have a clue that Medicaid is debt they accumulate with the government, not health insurance.
There's another reality: Older people have greater healthcare needs. I read a report showing that the average need for a healthy older adult is around $10K per year. That being true, had my father not had a serious condition --had he been of average health-- he would have racked-up somewhere around $350,000 in medical debt to the government while on Medicaid. The actual number is closer to a million bucks.
A million dollars of debt to the government. And we call this insurance?
Let's see you face that reality and see how you react.
I'm getting sick of saying this. All of this bullshit still misses the greater point:
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We should not have a program that is falsely promoted as "health insurance" that actually has the government sink it's hooks into people's estates.
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That is immoral. It is objectively wrong. It is also fraudulent. Obamacare reports taut "27 million insured". No. It's a lie. You have millions of people shoved into Medicaid, which is not insurance. It is debt. Maybe not for all today. Certainly for millions today, maybe 30+ million. And certainly for millions of others who think they have insurance yet, as they approach the estate recovery threshold are unlikely to realize what "insurance" they actually don't have.
It's really sobering to receive a letter from the government demanding payment of $900K in medical care.
[1] http://kff.org/medicaid/state-indicator/medicaid-enrollment-...
Go figure out the median estate recovery in a few states and I'll listen.
(Or however you want to present the statistics, but get some numbers.)