Progressives are still trying to coax West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin into supporting a partisan tax-and-spending bill. How rude of the Medicare and Social Security Trustees to interrupt this serenade with a reminder last week that the entitlements are going broke.

The 2022 Medicare Trustees report’s silver lining is that the hospital insurance fund is expected to stay solvent until 2028, two years longer than projected last year. “This is encouraging news,” said Texas Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett. Alas, a major reason is that Covid killed many elderly with expensive-to-treat health conditions.

Payroll tax revenue that supports the hospital fund has also surged owing to a buoyant recovery and faster wage growth. This underscores how stronger economic growth can help ease the country’s entitlement burden. But the trustees still forecast that the hospital fund will run deficits of $530 billion over the next decade as spending exceeds tax receipts.

This is probably an optimistic scenario. The report notes that payments to providers are not expected to keep pace with physician costs, so Congress will probably need to increase them to ensure seniors don’t lose access to care. Congress for the past two decades has repeatedly stopped provider payment cuts from happening.



Democrats blame Big Pharma for bankrupting Medicare, but annual Part D prescription drug costs have grown on average 1% over the last five years. That’s far less than inflation, GDP and other Medicare spending. Even expensive drugs that grow spending in the short run can reduce long-term health spending.

Consider Hepatitis C treatments, which public-health scolds lambasted as too pricey when they launched nearly a decade ago. Prices have since plummeted 75% from about $100,000 per course thanks to market competition. A Department of Health and Human Services analysis estimates the treatments reduce patient health costs by about $16,000 annually and will save Medicaid $12 billion after this year.

Once the hospital trust fund runs dry, spending will have to be slashed by 10%. The Democratic solution is to let Medicare “negotiate” drug prices—their euphemism for price controls. But this will reduce the incentive to develop innovative treatments for hard-to-treat conditions like Alzheimer’s. The result may be higher Medicare spending over the long term.

The news from the trustees’ report on Social Security is little better. The program is expected to exhaust its reserves by 2035, at which point all retirees will face an automatic 20% benefit cut. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget notes that the benefit cuts or tax hikes needed to keep both trust funds solvent will be smaller if Congress acts sooner.

But these days entitlement reform is taboo in Washington. Even Republicans are loath to propose gradually raising the Medicare age to 67 or means-testing Social Security benefits, and progressives want to expand benefits for both programs.

Democrats are trying to sell Mr. Manchin on raising taxes to fund green energy corporate welfare and sweetened Affordable Care Act subsidies. The point for Congress is that you don’t buy a Ferrari when you can’t afford to fix your leaky roof.


LINK: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a..._opin_pos_4#cxrecs_s

Look to the UK's National Health Service if you want to see what we're going to experience by the end of the decade.

quote:

Originally posted by Fly-Sig:
Look to the UK's National Health Service if you want to see what we're going to experience by the end of the decade.

^^^^^^^^^^
I am not that pessimistic. Friends who are Canadian physicians know that Americans are not going to wait for elective procedures. The UK health care system has problems and they have been operating since the 1940s. The size of the insurance companies such as UNH will not allow it. Americans get pissed when tampons are not available, they are gonna be even less patient when it comes to health care.

I notice welfare and SNAP never run out of money.......

Or even the Canadian system of managed care which is actually better termed managed spending.

As NHTAGMEMBER notes, look at the Canadian system of managed care which prompts many Canadian citizens to come to the US for medical treatment, given the very long wait times to see a doctor, especially a specialist, in Canada!