Read the combined Trustees report summary:
http://www.ssa.gov/oact/trsum/index.htmlUnder current law, Medicare goes bust around 2023 (last date, earliest date about 2018), and Social Security goes bust by 2036. Yeah, the budget would be balanced - but that's because seniors wouldn't be getting benefits.
Also, those graphs:
Primary spending is the budget spending
ASIDE from the interest expense. When you put interest expense in there, the deficit expands forever.
Also, do you understand HOW the budget gets balanced under current law?
For example, the Bush tax cuts expire. The 10% tax bracket becomes 15%. The 25% tax bracket becomes 28%. Yeah, it's so nice that the top taxpayers pay 39.6%, but then the 5% penalty on the lower earners is gonna hurt, especially since their personal deduction gets cut.
Under current law, full disability payments will no longer be made by 2017/2018, with about a 20% cut estimated for 2018. Do you know many disabled people who could survive on 75-80% of what they are now getting? And this would not save any money, because more of them would have to rely on food stamps and Medicaid and so forth, so when you actually sit down and analyze it, the budget doesn't get balanced under current law.
But maybe you don't give a crap about some disabled person getting a $980 check. Well, I bet you do care about your Social Security and Medicare future.
Under current law, Medicare reimbursements to physicians get cut about 29% in January of next year. And there are further cuts every year after that, so by about 2025 (14 years from now), the Medicare trustees estimate that doctors and hospitals will only be paid about half of current payment levels. You really think your insurance is going to be worth a flip if that happens?
Here is the Medicare Trustees report. I suggest you read it:
https://www.cms.gov/ReportsTrustFunds/downloads/tr2011.pdfIn past reports, and again this year, the Board of Trustees has emphasized the strong likelihood that actual Part B expenditures will exceed the projections under current law due to further legislative action to avoid substantial reductions in the Medicare physician fee schedule. While the Part B projections in this report are reasonable in their portrayal of future costs under current law, they are not reasonable as an indication of actual future costs. Current law would require a physician fee reduction of an estimated 29.4 percent on January 1, 2012—an implausible expectation.
Further, while the Affordable Care Act makes important changes to the Medicare program and substantially improves its financial outlook, there is a strong likelihood that certain of these changes will not be viable in the long range. Specifically, the annual price updates for most categories of non-physician health services will be adjusted downward each year by the growth in economy-wide productivity. The best available evidence indicates that most health care providers cannot improve their productivity to this degree—or even approach such a level—as a result of the labor-intensive nature of these services.
Without major changes in health care delivery systems, the prices paid by Medicare for health services are very likely to fall increasingly short of the costs of providing these services. By the end of the long-range projection period, Medicare prices for hospital, skilled nursing facility, home health, hospice, ambulatory surgical center, diagnostic laboratory, and many other services would be less than half of their level under the prior law. Medicare prices would be considerably below the current relative level of Medicaid prices, which have already led to access problems for Medicaid enrollees, and far below the levels paid by private health insurance. Well before that point, Congress would have to intervene to prevent the withdrawal of providers from the Medicare market and the severe problems with beneficiary access to care that would result. Overriding the productivity adjustments, as Congress has done repeatedly in the case of physician payment rates, would lead to far higher costs for Medicare in the long range than those projected under current law.
For these reasons, the financial projections shown in this report for Medicare do not represent a reasonable expectation for actual program operations in either the short range (as a result of the unsustainable reductions in physician payment rates) or the long range (because of the strong likelihood that the statutory reductions in price updates for most categories of Medicare provider services will not be viable). I encourage readers to review the “illustrative alternative” projections that are based on more sustainable assumptions for physician and other Medicare price updates. These projections are available at
http://www.cms.gov/ActuarialStudies/Downloads/2011TRAlternativeScenario.pdf.Regardless, let's assume that all this does go into effect. See page 79. The Medicare HI trust fund is due to run out some time between 2018 and 2023, even under current law. And at that point, you don't have hospital insurance. This will be a savings to the budget, I grant you.
As for Social Security, the last Trustees report figured the trust fund would be exhausted in 2036, after which Social Security benefits were estimated to be paid at about 77% of full benefits. What a coincidence! 2037 is the first year I qualify for full SS benefits! I'm thrilled. Too bad I will never get Medicare.
But damn, it's nice to know that the budget will be balanced under current law! Why the hell would anyone worry?
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