The Medicare trust fund that pays the hospital bills of elderly patients is set to run out of reserves two years earlier than previously projected, the program’s trustees said Wednesday.
The Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund will be depleted by 2028, bumped earlier from a date of 2030 in last year’s report. At that point, Medicare will be able to cover 87 percent of costs, falling to 79 percent by 2043.
The timeline for Social Security’s financial health is unchanged from last year’s estimate, with the program’s trust funds expected to run out by 2034. Social Security could pay only 79 percent of benefits at that point.
However, Social Security beneficiaries can expect a modest 0.2 percent increase in monthly payments next year, a year after they received no such hike.
The gloomy news for Medicare’s and Social Security’s finances—at this point an annual reminder of a neglected policy challenge—comes against the backdrop of a presidential campaign that features candidates not keen on entitlement reform. The mantra of making Medicare and Social Security solvent in the long-term has traditionally fallen to the Republican nominee for president, but Donald Trump’s position is to not touch the programs.
“I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” Trump told The Daily Signal last May. “Every other Republican is going to cut, and even if they wouldn’t, they don’t know what to do because they don’t know where the money is. I do.”
