6 Jun 2016
Infographic

Who Pays for Medicare? Beneficiaries Pay a Substantial and Growing Share

This infographic illustrates key points from a series of papers by AIR, which reexamine the perennial policy question: Is Medicare sustainable? The papers, and the infographic, show that beneficiaries bear almost a third of the cost of Medicare, and that burden will rise as older adults increasingly stay on the job and continue to pay income and payroll taxes.

Infographic: What is the financial burden of Medicare?

Related Work

6 Jun 2016
News Release

Four New Papers From AIR’s Center on Aging Challenge Claims About Medicare’s Sustainability

A new series of papers by AIR reexamines a perennial policy question, particularly in an election season: Is Medicare sustainable? Led by Marilyn Moon, director of AIR’s Center on Aging and a former public trustee of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, the papers conclude that several claims at the heart of most debates on Medicare’s future rest on faulty assumptions.
6 Jun 2016
Commentary

Is Medicare Really Unaffordable?

Each year when Medicare’s Trustees report comes out, as it will soon, pundits and politicians fixate on the projection of when Medicare funding will be eclipsed by Medicare spending. But, Marilyn Moon asks, don’t we also need to know who pays for Medicare? What the taxpayer burden is and how much program participants pay? Whether we can afford Medicare as the U.S. population ages?
Topic: 
Health, Aging
6 Jun 2016
Brief

Measures of Medicare's Finances Reconsidered: Introduction to the Series

The debate over Medicare’s future takes many forms. At its most basic, the issue is whether we can (or want to) afford Medicare. This series of issue briefs addresses key questions concerning the future of Medicare and how that will affect taxpayers and beneficiaries over time.
Topic: 
Health, Aging

Further Reading