Voters Strongly Support Expanding Medicare Coverage and Lowering the Eligibility Age
By Lew Blank
This week, Senator Bernie Sanders made the case to President Biden that he should include two policies to expand Medicare in his 2024 platform: lowering the eligibility age and including dental, vision, and hearing coverage.
Our polling has long found that proposed expansions to Medicare are highly popular with voters. A Data for Progress survey from 2023 found that 65% of voters want to increase Medicare funding while just 2% want to cut it — the third-best margin among all government programs we tested.
In a new survey, we find that voters across party lines support both proposals from Sanders. Ninety-two percent of voters — including overwhelming margins of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans — support expanding Medicare to provide dental, vision, and hearing benefits. This is a notable increase from our 2021 poll of the same question, which found 83% support for this policy. Since 2021, support has risen 10 points among Independents and 13 points among Republicans.
Additionally, 65% of voters support lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 60 — a policy that Biden campaigned on in 2020 and proposed in the FY 2022 federal budget. This includes majorities of Democrats (79%), Independents (62%), and Republicans (54%). Support for lowering the Medicare eligibility age has also risen since our 2021 poll of the same question, including a 9-point bump among Independents.
These results demonstrate that voters, including Independents and Republicans, solidly back proposals to expand Medicare eligibility and coverage.
Lew Blank (@LewBlank)is the communications strategist at Data for Progress.