Previous research has found that Medicare benefits flow primarily to the most economically advantaged groups and that the financial returns to Medicare are consequently higher for the rich than for the poor. Taking a different approach, we find very different results. According to the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey, the poorest groups receive the most benefits at any given age. In fact, the advantage of the poor in benefit receipt is so great that it easily overcomes their higher death rates. This leads to the result that the financial returns to Medicare are actually much higher for poorer groups in the population and that Medicare is a highly progressive public program. These new results appear to owe themselves to our measurement of socioeconomic status at the individual level, in contrast to the aggregated measures used by previous research.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
9280.
Length: Date of creation: Oct 2002 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:9280
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Julie Lee & Mark McClellan & Jonathan Skinner, 1999.
"The Distributional Effects of Medicare,"
NBER Chapters,
in: Tax Policy and the Economy, volume 13, pages 85-108
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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