Security for Seniors
VoteJan: For Maintaining Medicare!
For seniors, their families and the country as a whole, we must continue to support Medicare. Jan Schneider also supports adding coverage for vision, dental, long-term care and prescription drugs with minimal out-of-pocket costs.
Millions Depend on Medicare
Roughly 63.7 million seniors aged 65 and older rely on Medicare for their health insurance coverage. According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, total 2026 Medicare enrollment has reached 70.3 million beneficiaries—90.6 percent older adults and the remaining 9.4 percent younger individuals qualifying due to severe disabilities or specific medical conditions. About 51.2 percent have opted for Medicare Advantage and 81.2 percent added Part D coverage.
Protect Medicare from Privatization
While insisting on maintaining the health and financial stability of Medicare, I remain adamantly opposed to efforts to privatize Medicare. Republicans in Congress have repeatedly sought to convert it to a “premium support” or “voucher” system. This would effectively deny healthcare to millions of seniors, since support payments or vouchers would cover only about 40 percent of insurance premiums and additional healthcare costs. Overall, such privatization could thrust this country back to the situation before enactment of Medicare in 1965, when half of seniors had no health insurance and almost all lacked access to tax-subsidized policies from employers.
Strengthen Medicare for the Future
Medicare faces financial problems, due both to the hordes of Americans reaching senior status while the workforce is shrinking and to burgeoning and excessive healthcare expenses in the United States. The former is inexorable; but the fact that this country spends more on our healthcare system than all other industrialized countries without better outcomes need not be. Medicare may itself offer a path to a solution. Allowing all Americans to buy into the system at relative actuarial costs may offer the best means for stabilizing Medicare, reining in future healthcare expenses and protecting the health of Baby Boomers and their successors.
A Practical Path to Universal Coverage
Meanwhile, the United States remains the only wealthy, industrialized country without a comprehensive national health insurance or healthcare system. Government control of healthcare delivery mechanisms—national healthcare or socialized medicine in traditional terms—appears contrary to the political and economic culture in this country, as well as repugnant to large portions of the medical community and citizenry. On the other hand, expanding Medicare, a social insurance program, progressively to cover younger age groups on a voluntary basis seems the least disruptive and most promising path to achieving universal health insurance, reductions in the costs of American healthcare and a healthier population. Beyond that, it should go without saying that remedial measures must include continuing and expanding efforts to cut down the fraud, waste and abuse that plague the system at healthcare provider levels.
Medicare is indispensable to seniors, their families and others. I support maintaining this vital social safety net and transitioning to Medicare-for-All.
VoteJan: For Maintaining Medicare!
