Medicare faces an unfunded liability of $38.6 trillion, according to the Medicare Trustees report released Monday.
The unfunded liability is the amount that has been promised in benefits to people now alive that will not be funded by the tax revenue the system is expected to take in to pay for those benefits. (The Medicare Trustees calculate the unfunded liability for a period of 75 years into the future.)
The $38.6 trillion in unfunded benefits Medicare is expected to pay over the next 75 years equals $328,404.43 for each of the 117,538,000 households the Census Bureau said there were in the United States in 2010.
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