Seen at the Washington Post:
Trustees for the government’s two biggest benefit programs warned Tuesday that Social Security and Medicare are facing “enormous challenges” with the threat to Medicare’s solvency far more severe.
The trustees, issuing a once-a-year analysis of the government’s two biggest benefit programs, said the resources in the Social Security trust fund will be depleted by 2041. The reserves in the Medicare trust fund that pays hospital benefits were projected to be wiped out by 2019.
Both those dates were the same as in last year’s report. But the trustees warned that financial pressures will begin much sooner when the programs begin paying out more in benefits each year than they collect in payroll taxes. For Medicare, that threshold is projected to be reached this year and for Social Security it is projected to occur in 2017.
In English, that last paragraph means that this year, Medicare will have to start drawing upon its trust fund to pay the bills. Of course, since the Medicare trust fund has already been spent to fund other government priorities, cashing in the IOUs the Treasury left behind means that the feds will have to borrow that much more….
Every year the federal government stalls in addressing the projected shortfalls, the harder it will become to avoid them. The menu of choices available to address the funding issues has been well-known for years. However, politicians seem far more enthusiastic about playing politics than in actually making the tough decisions required.