Kash Monsori summarizes the pictures of Medicare and Social Security painted by the just-released Trustees' Report:
The SS program will only be able to cover about three-fourths of its expenses by the year 2041; the Medicare program will reach almost the same point in 2019. Fixing the SS shortfall would require a 16 percent increase in payroll taxes; fixing the Medicare shortfall would require a 122 percent increase in payroll taxes.
We could fix Social Security with our eyes closed. Hell, if the trends remain relatively favorable, we won't need to do anything at all. Since I'm in a chart mood lately, the following graph comes from a presentation by Brookings' health care expert Henry Aaron. Notice how gradual Social Security's slope of growth is as compared to Medicare and Medicaid:
But you never hear about conservative plans to reform Medicare. And the reason is that they don't quite knows what to do. Meanwhile, Medicare is just another way of saying "health care," as the exact problems that bedevil our public insurance afflict our private insurance, we just don't issue yearly reports on their effects. This is why liberals tend to focus on systemwide reform; unless you get costs down across the board, were in serious trouble. The following comes from EPI's Jared Bernstein, and it shows what happens to per capita shares of GDP of the next few decades. The yellow line is what happens when you subtract health costs from GDP:
That line going down? That's your income. Cost growth in the private sector is, depending on which data you believe, precisely what it is in the public sector or a little bit higher. Unless we get the whole system under control, we're all going to be hurting.
