Medicare turned 45 last week, and let’s just say that the years have not been kind.
The Medicare trustees reported last year that the program’s total unfunded liability was $89 trillion—no, that’s not a misprint—five times larger than Social Security’s, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis.
The reason we’re using last year’s report is that the Obama administration has been holding or delaying—who knows which—this year’s trustees report for four months. It may be released this week, in the dead of August when members of Congress are back in their districts, many of them avoiding town halls.
Realizing it’s facing a PR nightmare, the White House is trying to put a happy face on the bankrupt program.
For one thing, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is spending $700,000 in tax dollars running an ad featuring Andy Griffith, who explains why ObamaCare is so good for seniors. The White House knows that seniors are the ones most wary of the president’s health care reform.
Almost immediately FactCheck.org, from the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, released its statement on the truthfulness of the ad asking, “Would the sheriff of Mayberry mislead you about Medicare? Alas, yes.” That pretty much “nips it in the bud,” as Barney Fife might say.
Not willing to leave bad enough alone, the administration continues to claim that ObamaCare strengthens and preserves Medicare. It cites, for example, its increase in the Medicare payroll tax for high-income families (up 0.9 percentage points) and a new tax on investment income of 3.8 percent.
Of course, that money is being used to offset the direct costs in ObamaCare, and can’t be double counted—as the administration keeps trying to do—to financially strengthen Medicare.
And then there’s that little issue of cutting $530 billion from Medicare so that Democrats could claim that ObamaCare cost less than $1 trillion. No wonder the White House doesn’t want the public seeing the trustees report.
At 45 Medicare is already on life support. It needs a financial critical care team, not an economic quack who claims to be curing the patient even as it slowly expires.