The big fix

Republicans are talking about making at least $100 billion in cuts or reductions in the growth of medicare--the highly popular, though increasingly unaffordable, health program for older Americans. But is taking on medicare a political poison pill?     

Mapping Medicare

For senior citizens enrolled in medicare HMOs, the size of payments depends on where they live. As HMOs for seniors become uneconomical in rural areas, the system is in danger of breaking down.     

Medicare crooks

Medicare is racked with more waste, fraud and abuse than anyone had imagined. Ending overpayments would keep the program from going bankrupt in 2001. But can the government hunt down all the swindlers? Don't count on it.     

Does Medicare benefit the poor?

Measuring the progressivity of age-targeted government programs is difficult because no single data set measures income and benefit use throughout life. Previous research, using zip code as a proxy for lifetime income, has found that Medicare benefits flow primarily to the most economically advantaged groups, and that the financial returns to Medicare are often higher for the rich than the poor. However, our analysis produces the starkly opposed result that Medicare is an extraordinarily progressive public program, in dollar terms or welfare terms. These new results owe themselves to our measurement of socioeconomic status as an individual's education, rather than the geographically aggregated measures of income used by previous research. We argue that individual education has important practical and conceptual advantages over geographically aggregated measures of income. Our results suggest the crucial importance of accurate poverty measurement in evaluating the progressivity of complex government programs like Medicare or Social Security.