The NYT gives the incorrect impression that Medicare's designated funds will be used to pay for President Obama's health care reform. An article discussing the attitude of the elderly toward reform reports:
"Knowing that Medicare itself faces a financial crisis, many older Americans object to Congress’s tapping the program to help pay for coverage of the uninsured. They say they do not believe that all the Medicare savings will come from eliminating waste and inefficiency, as Mr. Obama says.
'Medicare is nearly broke,' said James P. Ivey, 66, of Deer Park, Wis. Mr. Ivey predicted its financial problems would grow as the ratio of beneficiaries to workers increased in coming years."
While Medicare's trust fund is projected to go into a deficit by 2017, there is no proposal that would take money from this trust fund to pay for health care reform. President Obama does propose to reduce overall Medicare spending as a way to offset the cost of extending coverage, but this will in no way worsen the finances of Medicare's trust fund. In fact, by slowing the growth of Medicare expenditures, it should improve the finances of Medicare's trust fund.
A second Trump administration will cement a right-wing majority on the Supreme Court for a generation, and put our collective future in the hands of someone who will be virtually unchecked by our institutions. The country has shifted rightward, and the reverberations will ensue for potentially the next few decades. In this climate, a robust independent media ecosystem will be more important than ever. We're committed to bringing you the latest news on how Trump's agenda will actually affect the American people, shining a light on the stories corporate media overlooks and keeping the public informed about how power really works in this country.
Quality journalism is expensive to produce, and we don't have corporate backers to rely on to fund what we do. Everything we do is thanks to our incredible community of readers, who chip in a few dollars at a time to make our work possible. Any amount you give today will help us continue reporting on what matters to our democracy.
