Excerpt Of The Day: The Coming Medicare Crisis

by John Hawkins | October 30, 2006 6:12 am

“…(W)ith the first baby boomers becoming eligible for Social Security in 2008 and for Medicare in 2011, the expenses of those two programs are about to increase dramatically due to demographic pressures. People are also living longer, which makes any program that provides benefits to retirees more expensive.

Medicare already costs four times as much as it did in 1970, measured as a percentage of the nation’s gross domestic product. It currently comprises 13 percent of federal spending; by 2030, the Congressional Budget Office projects it will consume nearly a quarter of the budget.

Economists Jagadeesh Gokhale of the American Enterprise Institute and Kent Smetters of the University of Pennsylvania have an even scarier way of looking at Medicare. Their method calculates the program’s long-term fiscal shortfall – the annual difference between its dedicated revenues and costs – over time.

By 2030 they calculate Medicare will be about $5 trillion in the hole, measured in 2004 dollars. By 2080, the fiscal imbalance will have risen to $25 trillion. And when you project the gap out to an infinite time horizon, it reaches $60 trillion.” — Associated Press[1]

Endnotes:
  1. Associated Press: http://apnews.myway.com/article/20061028/D8L1OC5G0.html

Source URL: https://rightwingnews.com/uncategorized/excerpt-of-the-day-the-coming-medicare-crisis/