Tag Archives: Baby Boomers

U.S. healthcare costs to escalate over next decade: government agency

doctor holds hand of patient

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The cost of medical care in the United States is expected to grow at a faster clip over the next decade and overall health spending growth will outpace that of the gross domestic product, a U.S. government health agency said on Wednesday.

A report by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) cited the aging of the enormous baby boom generation and overall economic inflation as prime contributors to the projected increase in healthcare spending.

Overall healthcare spending will comprise 19.9 percent of the economy in 2025, up from 17.8 percent in 2015, the report forecast. The pace of growth in U.S. spending on health is expected to pick up in 2017, increasing 5.4 percent over 2016. That compares with an estimated 4.8 percent spending uptick in 2016. Spending for 2016 was estimated at $3.4 trillion.

When the final numbers are in, the growth in prescription drug spending for 2016 is expected to have slowed to 5 percent from 9 percent in 2015. However, CMS has forecast growth of 6.4 percent per year between 2017 and 2025, in part because of spending on expensive newer specialty drugs, such as for cancer and multiple sclerosis.

The projections for 2016 to 2025 were made assuming that the Affordable Care Act (ACA), former President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law widely known as Obamacare, would remain intact. It does not take into account likely changes to the law.

The Republican-led Congress and President Donald Trump have vowed to repeal and replace the ACA, but a viable replacement plan has yet to emerge.

Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office last month to freeze regulations and enable government agencies to take other steps to weaken Obamacare.

The ACA expanded Medicaid, the government health insurance program for the poor, in more than 30 states and set up private healthcare exchanges that enabled previously uninsured people to buy health insurance. After high enrollment between 2014 and 2015, Medicaid and private health insurance spending were expected to have slowed in 2016.

But spending on Medicare, the government health insurance program for the elderly, is expected to grow between 2017 and 2025 as a larger elderly population requires more medical services.

The overall insured rate of the population is expected to reach 91.5 percent in 2025, up from 90.9 percent in 2015, the report said.

(Reporting By Yasmeen Abutaleb; Editing by Tom Brown)

Negative tone of White House race sours young voters

Millenials see President Obama speak

By Scott Malone

BOSTON (Reuters) – The exceptionally negative tone of this year’s race for the White House is souring young Americans, turning some away from the democratic process just as the millennial generation has become as large a potential bloc of voters as the baby boomers.

Reuters/Ipsos polling shows that Americans aged 18 to 34 are slightly less likely to vote for president this year than their comparably aged peers were in 2012. Some political scientists worry that this election could scar a generation of voters, making them less likely to cast ballots in the future.

Young Americans on the left and right have found reasons to be dissatisfied with their choices this year. Senator Bernie Sanders had an enthusiastic following of younger people before he lost the Democratic primary race to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. On the Republican side, some are unwilling to vote for Donald Trump, citing the New York businessman’s sometimes insulting rhetoric on women, minorities and immigrants.

Brandon Epstein, who turned 18 on Monday, had looked forward earlier in the year to casting his first vote for Sanders. Now, the resident of suburban Suffolk County, New York, plans to sit out the vote on Election Day, Nov. 8.

“It’s because of the selection of the candidates. I find them to be not just sub-par, but unusually sub-par,” said Epstein, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Something’s gone terribly wrong.”

That sentiment is broadly reflected in poll data that show that young Americans are less enthusiastic about their choices in November than they were four years ago when Democratic President Barack Obama faced a re-election challenge from Republican Mitt Romney.

Some 52.2 percent of respondents aged 18 to 34 told Reuters/Ipsos they were certain or almost certain to vote, compared with 56.1 percent who reported that level of certainty at the same point in 2012.

The national tracking poll was conducted online in English in all 50 states. It included 3,088 people between 18-34 years old who took the survey from Oct. 1 to Oct. 17, and 2,141 18-34 year olds who took the poll on the same days in 2012. It has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 2 percentage points for both groups.

‘DEEP CYNICISM’

For at least the past half century, young Americans have voted at lower rates than their elders. But this year’s decline in enthusiasm is of particular concern because it comes as the millennial generation – people born from 1981 through 1997 – has become as large a bloc of eligible voters as the baby boomers – born between 1946 and 1964. Each group’s number of eligible voters is approaching 70 million people, according to the Pew Research Center.

“This generation has never trusted the government, Wall Street or the media less,” John Della Volpe, director of polling at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, said of the millennials. “That’s likely to result in turnout of less than 50 percent and of those who do turn out, there is still a deep cynicism regarding the impact of their vote, whether or not it will make a difference.”

The projected low turnout is a particular concern given recent research showing how important habit is in encouraging voter participation. Put simply, a person who votes in one election is about 10 percent more likely to vote in the next than an eligible voter who opted to stay home, said Alexander Coppock, an assistant professor of political science at Yale University.

“If you extend that logic, if you have an election that fails to turn people on to voting, you’d expect that you wouldn’t get that cumulative effect,” said Coppock, whose article “Is Voting Habit Forming?” was published in this month’s issue of the American Journal for Political Science.

However, not all young voters unhappy with their choices will be staying home. Some plan to cast a ballot anyway, even if only in protest, rather than sitting out.

That group includes Cameron Khansarinia, a 20-year-old vice president of the Harvard Republican Club, who said he would cast a ballot even though he opposed Trump.

“I will definitely vote, I just don’t know if I will be writing someone in or voting for (Libertarian) Gary Johnson or even voting for Hillary Clinton when it gets down to it,” said Khansarinia, who is registered to vote in heavily Democratic California. “Once this is over, come Nov. 9, we will need people here to rebuild the party.”

(Reporting by Scott Malone; Editing by Frances Kerry)