There’s a scene in the John Landis comedy Trading Places when Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd stand in the potential energy of the New York Stock Exchange’s trading floor. It’s a few ticks before the opening bell, and the camera cuts from the wall clock to the zombies below: pit traders in shirts, ties, and pantsuits staring catatonically at the second hand as it nears the top of the hour. A buzzer sounds, and the open outcry begins. Buyers yelp and gesture orders with their hands and eventually start hopping up and down to be noticed, like they’re pogo dancing at Wembley. I mention this because that’s how I imagine most Washington reporters received the latest CBO score of the Republican health care bill.
It was an oversold exercise. New Jersey representative Tom MacArthur cautioned that the Congressional Budget Office’s staff does not comprise “prophets,” but Washington’s political zealots spread news of their work like it was infallible text. May your eyes never know the whiplash of watching three dozen journalists tweet simultaneously, “Hark! It’s here: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/52752.” If only such folk would have interpreted the word of the budget gods literally. No, the GOP bill would not cause 23 million people to “lose” insurance. Yes, “the estimates discussed in this document are uncertain,” in some cases “especially.” And above all, they ultimately don’t matter: The American Health Care Act is a political issue, but it will never become law.
Unlike, say, Social Security and Medicare, which have the problem of being both politically hazardous and worth 41 percent of all federal spending. Sometime within the next two months, the program’s trustees will release their annual estimates of how much longer the government can satisfy 100 percent of the payments owed to beneficiaries. As usual, they will announce that the trust funds paying for disability (DI) and inpatient hospital care (HI) have been running a deficit and will be depleted within the next decade-plus. They will project that the combined trust funds for Social Security disability and retirement benefits—the latter (OASI) being the largest individual fund by more than half—will run dry in the next couple of decades. And they will continue to forecast that the cost of Medicare Parts B and D, despite not facing impending shortfalls because of their funding mechanism, will explode over the same period, doubling as a share of the economy’s total output. As the CBO itself has consistently predicted in recent years, government health care spending, including Medicare, is a primary driver of long-term debt that would “increase the likelihood of a fiscal crisis.”
None of these expectations is a new development. As last year’s Social Security trustees report reads, the programs will experience financial challenges because “the number of beneficiaries rises rapidly as the baby-boom generation retires . . . and the lower birth rates that have persisted since the baby boom cause slower growth of the labor force and [the economy].” In other news, “Reagan leads Carter in new poll” and “I want my MTV.”
Entitlement reform has historically been a Republican priority. But the one who now occupies the White House is averse to such policy, putting him at odds with House speaker Paul Ryan, for whom the issue is career-defining, and his own budget director, former Rep. Mick Mulvaney. “For now, the divide between the White House and the House on Medicare reform is simmering on the back burner,” Mike Warren reports, and Social Security is a non-starter. As for the media? Don’t expect the coming trustees report to be anywhere near the stovetop.
