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“Earlier this month, President Barack Obama sat down with world leaders at the G8 summit and bragged about his track record of supposed good governance — how he has worked to “bring down our deficits and debt over the longer term” and made “room to take a balanced approach to reducing our deficit and debt.” There are plenty of ways to shoot holes in the president’s pronouncement, but there is one glaring example of where he has come up far short — failing to address America’s growing Medicare crisis. In “Medicare at Risk: Visualizing the Need for Reform,” Heritage’s Kathryn Nix and John Fleming illustrate the facts about Medicare and why Washington must come to the rescue with innovative solutions to preserve the program today and into the future. President Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law in 1965, creating a program that today provides health insurance to some 48 million Americans. Now, though, that program is in desperate need of reform as the United States grapples with retiring baby boomers entering the system, increasing health care costs and a status quo that simply can’t be sustained. Case in point: Medicare spending is growing faster than the rest of the federal budget, and it’s the main cause of America’s long-term deficits. As Nix and Fleming show, Medicare’s costs are projected to shoot through the roof, surpassing Social Security, Medicaid, Obamacare subsidies and all other non-interest spending by 2050. Want more proof on how bad the situation is? By 2040, Medicare’s shortfall will account for 81 percent of the federal deficit.”
