People under 65 with disabilities are less satisfied with Medicare than adults over 65, reports Kaiser Family Foundation. The reason is likely that people with disabilities need a lot more health care than older adults and face obstacles to care that people who are relatively healthy do not face. Still, people under 65 with Medicare are more satisfied with their health care coverage than people who have Medicaid, employer coverage or coverage through a state health insurance exchange.
Medicare covers about 66 million people. Nearly eight million (12 percent) of them are under 65 and enrolled in Medicare because of long-term disabilities, including End-Stage Renal Disease and ALS. People with disabilities on Medicare are more likely to be people of color, people with lower incomes and lower education levels; they also tend to be people in worse health than people over 65 in Medicare.
No matter how you qualify for Medicare, you are supposed to get the same Medicare benefits. But, people under 65 are not guaranteed the right to Medicare supplemental insurance or Medigap–coverage that generally picks up most or almost all of people’s out-of-pocket costs–from a commercial insurer. So, unless people qualify for Medicaid or a Medicare Savings Program, they could have large out-of-pocket costs in Traditional Medicare and in Medicare Advantage. Not surprisingly, people with disabilities on Medicare report greater struggles getting and paying for care as well as less satisfaction with Medicare than people over 65.
Overall satisfaction with Medicare jumps from 79 percent for people with disabilities to 92 percent for people over 65. Much of the concern among people with disabilities is around their ability to get care from good quality physicians and hospitals. Seven in ten of them reported having a problem with Medicare in the last year, whereas far fewer people over 65 (five in ten) say they experienced a problem with Medicare.
It’s important to keep in mind that it’s a lot easier for people who do not use the health care system much or at all to be satisfied with their Medicare coverage than people who have complex conditions, as many people with disabilities under 65 do. About half of people with disabilities say they are in fair or poor physical health. Just 19 percent of people over 65 report that they are in fair or poor physical health. In fact, about half of people with Medicare use little or no health care in any given year.
About 3o percent of people with disabilities say they have fair or poor mental health, as compared with just nine percent of people over 65. Twenty seven percent of them struggled to get mental health treatment they needed but was not covered, as compared with seven percent of people over 65. Eighteen percent said that they could not get medicines they thought they needed, as compared with five percent of people over 65.
