Medicare and Social Security are on a fast track to deep fiscal problems, trustees for the two programs warned Monday.
The Medicare trust fund will be “exhausted” — meaning it won’t have enough money on hand to cover the benefits it’s supposed to provide — by 2024, the trustees said, the same time frame anticipated in a report last year. Social Security will reach that tipping point in 2033, three years earlier than predicted last year.
“Under current law, both of these vitally important programs are on unsustainable paths,” Trustee Robert Reischauer said Monday.
Both parties looked to score political points on the news, with Obama administration officials saying Medicare’s woes would be far more severe without the 2010 healthcare law, while Republicans used the new estimates to argue that President Obama isn’t serious about entitlement reform.
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