Tuesday, April 24, 2012

OVERNIGHT HEALTH: Medicare trustees push Congress to act quickly

Since the Medicare's hospital trust fund will be insolvent by 2024, the Medicare trustees hope that the impending budget crisis should spur Congress into acting quickly to resolve the issue.  However, partisan gridlock around entitlement reform is still over riding a need to resolve the issue.

Republicans charge that the President does not actually have any solid plan in place to tackle entitlements, while top administration officials use the report to use against Republicans by beating on their politically unpopular idea to privatize medicare.

However, if Congress is too caught up in gridlock to act on the issue, according to the trustees, there will not be enough money in the Medicare's hospital benefit budget to cover the expenses of all current benefits that are provided.

1 comment:

  1. What to do about Medicare is an extremely important decision that will eventually have to be made in this country. Unfortunately it is also a very dangerous topic for politicians to actually address. Current members of government see no need to interact with such a politically risky issue, especially when the consequences of their inaction will not be felt until many years down the line when some of them won’t even be in office. This collective failure will eventually simply allow the Medicare system to crash and burn with everyone pointing fingers and trying to fix the situation afterwards.
    Voters are also extremely protective of their individual entitlement programs and any attempts to take them away or reduce them are usually met with swift reprisal in the form of lost votes. This slow collapse would allow representatives to say they never took away benefits. It might also represent a real opportunity to eliminate and revise the Medicare system for both parties. This would be an unfortunate consequence however and would end up costing the country far more than an early fix would.

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