Medicare: Who qualifies for it and how many people are enrolled?

Medicare is health insurance for older adults and younger people with disabilities or rare health conditions. There are 64 million Medicare beneficiaries in America.

Almost half of the people with Medicare are age 65 to 74, and more than six million are over the age of of 85.

Medicare insurance isn't limited to the very old

Most Americans think of Medicare as insurance for the elderly. In fact, more than 10 million of enrollees are between the ages of 18 and 64. 

Younger people usually qualify for Medicare because they either get Social Security disability benefits or have a very serious health problem like kidney failure or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Many of these younger enrollees also get partial or full Medicaid benefits.

Millions of new people join Medicare every year

Medicare enrollment has grown steadily over the last 55 years and will continue increasing for the foreseeable future. 

There were 19.1 million Medicare recipients in 1966. By the turn of the 21st century, that number increased to 39 million. In just a few more years, in 2029, the Congressional Budget Office estimates 77 million Americans will rely on Medicare for their health insurance. 

In sheer numbers, California, Florida, Texas, New York and Pennsylvania are the states having the most Medicare enrollees; Wyoming and Alaska have the fewest. 

But those numbers can be misleading. Enrollment looks much different when you adjust for the size of each state. 

As a percentage of total residents, an incredible one out of every four people in Maine has Medicare, closely followed by West Virginia (24%), Vermont (22.9%), New Hampshire (21.4%) and Alabama (21%). 

Texas (14%) and California (16%), on the other hand, have among the lowest percentages of Medicare enrollees, bested only by Utah at 12%. 

Other things to know about Medicare recipients

Nationwide, most people with Medicare have some kind of supplemental health insurance such as Medicare Advantage, a Medicare supplement, Medicaid or employer-sponsored retiree coverage; only 10% did not.

In this way, very few people have only the Original Medicare plan. Someone or something is usually helping them pay for their health care.

Although the average Medicare enrollee has a lower income than a working age adult, they are rarely impoverished. Nine in every ten beneficiaries are above the federal poverty limit, one third of whom can be defined as affluent.