Day Of Reckoning Moving Up For Medicare
Congress is quickly running out of time to come up with solution to the looming insolvency of the Medicare program. Because of the impact of the recession on their finances, trustees for the program have had to move up the insolvency date of the program by a full two years and with the recessions still ongoing, don’t be surprised if that timetable gets cut again next year.
You can’t blame it on one party or another because both Democrats and Republicans have had control of Congress over the past decade, yet neither has acted on a problem that is quickly coming to a head. With the recession seeing a sharp rise in unemployment, there have been a large number of baby boomers that have been forced into early retirement and are straining a program that is already past it’s breaking point.
There are only two possible solutions, raise taxes or cut benefits or a combination of both. Neither party wants to spend the political capital to fix this mess but they are quickly running out of options the closer we get to D-Day.
The already cumbersome national debt has exploded because of the recession and the Obama administration’s bold plan for healthcare reform will add to that burden. Later generations will likely curse us for what we’ve done to the nation’s finances because they will be paying the price for our follies for many years to come.
Many people love entitlement programs and they also love low taxes, but you can’t have it both ways. If the government was a business, they would have been bankrupt long ago, if not for the fact that they can print their own money.
There is a third solution to the problem, if you can call it a solution because it would be a disaster for the majority of the nation’s population. Massive runaway inflation, it would make our money as well as our debt practically worthless but that’s what we could be looking at less than ten years down the road if the government is unwilling to make the hard choices sooner rather than later.
