These are people who have had their paychecks raided for the last 40 years for this program. If they had those dollars, they could have saved it to spend on health care in their later years.
You can’t simply take away what people have already paid for. It has to be incremental.
Anyone who has paid into Medicare for forty years, assuming their annual income was $80,000 for that entire period, has paid in maybe $50,000, tops.
One hospital stay for something like a cardiac bypass or valve implant will pretty much zero that out.
So from then on, that Medicare patient is riding in the cart that younger workers are pulling.