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Comment by lucasmullens | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what kind of circular logic this could create. Clearly we don't need to lower the age of Medicare eligibility, because 64-year-olds never get sick. 65 is the perfect cut-off based on the numbers! /s

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Alternatively, clearly we can afford to lower the age of Medicare eligibility to 64, because 64-year-olds never get sick, it won't cost very much at all.

Actually, I think we should decrease the age of eligibility over time to gradually get towards Medicare for all; I would lower the eligibility age by 6 months every year for 10 years to get to age 60, then 1 year per year for 5 to get down to age 55, then 2 years per year until you're done; maybe speed up again later. That would give Medicare time to increase capacity, and everyone else time to plan accordingly.

At some point you need to also deal with eligibility for people without work history and whatnot.

If only there was some lower bound on age that we could extend Medicare eligibility to and avoid this problem!

How about birth? Birth sounds good. And from conception to birth it's covered under the mother's name?

There would almost surely be a censoring effect no matter what age cutoff you pick, and even allowing for typical government incompetence, surely at some level health econometricians are involved in this type of policy and are aware and facilitate whatever trade-offs are being sought.

I love roasting poor government policy decision making as much as the next person, but that would be a bridge too far.

> There would almost surely be a censoring effect no matter what age cutoff you pick

This seems to be an ethical argument to make the age cutoff 0: in other words, medicare for all.

> surely at some level health econometricians are involved in this type of policy and are aware and facilitate whatever trade-offs are being sought.

I feel like this article would not be massive news if this was true. The other case I recall that would be like this is when oil execs held back info that they were causing climate change. That seems to me to be completely different, however, because that was a private company and we're talking about government employees here.

I don’t see any reason your comment would be accurate. It all depends on trade-offs. If the goal is to reduce cost, then you could equally argue to get rid of medicare entirely.

Clearly the goal (no matter what anyone’s separate normative opinion is) is to balance some complex tradeoff between costs borne by tax payers, costs borne by corporations (through taxes and through employer based healthcare for working age adults and their dependents), and a high level of access for all people.

Nothing about this censored data effect can say anything about the morality of different regions of that trade off space.

As to your second comment, this article is not massive news and it seems laughable to say it is. It’s just a blip in the news cycle, using some data artifact to drum up attention to something that is already well-known for any econometrician or health policy analyst.

Full disclosure: I personally favor nationalized medicine and welcome higher taxes across the board. Nonetheless I don’t find your comment to be accurate or valuable.

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