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Hospitalization Should Not Mean Financial Ruin for Medicare Beneficiaries | MedPage Today
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Chatterjee is a physician, health policy researcher, and an assistant professor of medicine. Macneal is a statistical analyst. Patel is a senior research coordinator.
Medicare was created to ensure older adults in the U.S. have healthcare coverage while protecting them from financial ruin. But for at least 10 million older adults today, one of the most influential insurance programs in the U.S. is failing. For this financially precarious population of Medicare beneficiaries, a hospitalization costs around $1,600 and triggers an immediate financial crisis. And with the risk of hospitalization rising with age, this kind of threat is all but unavoidable. Nearly 60 years after its founding, Medicare is full of coverage gaps
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and may be driving many near-poor older Americans into a poverty trap.
More than half of older adults in the U.S. are "near-poor," meaning they have incomes ranging from around $15,000 to $60,000 for individuals or $20,000 to $80,000 for couples. They are too well-off to qualify for Medicaid
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, but often cannot afford supplemental insurance. Some older adults enroll in Medicare Advantage plans or supplemental insurance called Medigap, but each program has a host of its own barriers. Most of these poor older adults live on fixed incomes and modest savings
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, so they can't just raise their income to pay off medical bills, particularly unexpected ones.