The Elderly Say "No"

Written by Andrew Gelman on Tuesday August 25, 2009

People on Medicare are often suspicious of expanded government involvement in healthcare, because they see it as competing with Medicare for scarce dollars.

Tom Schaller asks: "Why are senior citizens crying "socialism" at town halls?"

As we like to say in academia:  I don't know the answer, so let me tell you something I do know. (Graphs made in collaboration with Daniel Lee.)

First, who has health insurance (from the 2000 Annenberg survey):

do_you_have_health_insurance_graph

Next, should the government spend more on healthcare (this time from 2004):


do_you_favor_the_government_spending_more_on_health_insurance

Some Obamacare supporters say:  Senior citizens have Medicare, which is a government plan, so they should support a public healthcare provision, right?  But maybe some people on Medicare are suspicious of expanded government involvement in healthcare because they see it as competing with Medicare for scarce dollars.

Here are a couple more graphs (pretty similar to the second graph above):


do_you_favor_the_government_spending_more_on_health_insurance_for_workers

do_you_favor_the_government_spending_more_on_health_insurance_for_children


shoud_the_government_spend_more_on_medicare

Pretty much the older you are, the less you favor government spending on health care.

P.S.  The sample size is so huge we were able to have the luxury of plotting raw data.  All we did is pool the age categories 91 and up.  Yes, we could make the graph cleaner by smoothing it, but why bother?  The picture from the raw data is clear enough.

Category: News Tags: children elderly entitlements government health health insurance health reform healthcare insurance Medicare seniors spending town halls workers