Social Security and Medicare trustees confirm: GOP policies have hurt both programs [View all]
The publication of the annual trustees’ reports for Social Security and Medicare has become the occasion for some of the most consistently uninformed reporting on government programs of the year.
Within moments of their appearance, the Associated Press was tweeting, and later reported, that Medicare was projected to become “insolvent” in 2026, three years earlier than was projected last year.
Actually, no: The Medicare report projected that its hospital insurance trust fund, which applies to Medicare Part A, will be depleted in 2026. But since even then the program would be able to keep paying out more than 90% of scheduled benefits, it’s not anything like “insolvent.” As economist Dean Baker observes, at most it would be correct to say Medicare will face a “shortfall” in 2026, not insolvency.
The 2018 Trustees Report shows that the current program is fully affordable. Indeed, the United States can fully afford an expanded Social Security.
The more glaring oversight in Tuesday’s reporting on both programs is that the trustees made crystal clear that policies of congressional Republicans and the Trump White House have damaged the financial prospects of both programs. The GOP continually claims that it’s imperative to make both programs healthier to serve the 62 million people dependent on Social Security and 58.4 million covered by Medicare; the truth is that the Republicans are doing their best to cut the legs out from under both.
At: http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-social-security-20180605-story.html
Social Security and Medicare: Facing a GOP checkmate?
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