Washington renews demand for cuts to Social Security, Medicare (tags)
The Bush administration, echoed by much of the mass media, seized upon reports released May 1 on the fiscal health of the Social Security and Medicare system to renew its demand for drastic cuts to these two major entitlement programs, thereby gutting retirement benefits and health care for older Americans. According to the reports, issued by the trustees of the programs’ trust funds, the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund is projected to become insolvent by 2018, due largely to rapidly rising costs of American health care outstripping the payroll taxes that fund the program. The report on Social Security indicates that this program will be able to pay out 100 percent of benefits until 2040, when the trustees predict the fund will be exhausted—a year earlier than previous projections. After that it would be able to cover 74 percent of promised benefits out of revenues until 2080, when it would decline to 70 percent.