It may happen sooner than expected:

WASHINGTON — The nation’s Social Security and Medicare programs are sliding closer to insolvency, the federal government warned Monday in a new report that underscores the fiscal challenges facing the two mammoth retirement programs as baby boomers begin to retire.

Insolvency for Medicare is now coming in 2024. And Social Security? 2033.

Eli Sanders is The Stranger's associate editor. His book, "While the City Slept," was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He once did this and once won this,...

10 replies on “Good News for Those Who Want the Damn Government Hands Off Their Medicare”

  1. “Mark Warner’s on the twitter machine lying to everyone saying this means it “runs dry” in 2033. I can’t find the new report on the website yet, but the sentence to find is the one that reads something like “After 2033, without changes to the program Social Security will only be able to pay out X% of promised benefits” where X will be something between 75-80 or so and X% will be “higher benefits in real terms than current beneficiaries receive.”

    So, uh, not running dry, asshole.”
    — eschatonblog.com

  2. Journalism is reporting unquestioningly other people’s commentary on publicly-available source documents, without reading those source documents.

  3. Psst! Under 35? Whether these dates are accurate or not, the handwriting is on the wall: the social safety net that is likely to exist when you and I retire is going to be really, really shitty. Start planning and living accordingly now.

    Happy Tuesday!

  4. Seriously, if you have no idea what you’re posting about, why repost some idiotic right wing talking point? I mean, really, do you even look into this stuff before you post it? be a man, print a retraction.

  5. There’s a weird sort of fatalism that always seems to accompany these projections. As lin biao pointed out above, Social Security isn’t really in trouble at all, and can be fixed with minor adjustments, if we want to fix it. Which pretty much everyone does. (After the baby boomers retire, there is pretty much no growth in the cost of Social Security, so if we fix funding beyond 2030 or so, the problem never comes back.)

    If Medicare cost growth can be brought down closer to the rate of inflation, that date moves farther out into the future. (Also, per capita public spending on health care is higher in the US than in most major industrialized countries. We also have a ridiculously high level of private spending on health care; there’s no reason to believe we couldn’t reduce private spending while improving health outcomes.)

    Why we begin this conversation by assuming that no problem will ever get fixed, I don’t understand.

  6. Agree with what everyone has already said, especially the Eli is an idiot stuff. He’s only feeding into the myth that SS is a doomed entitlement; when it could easily be made solvent for decades.

    SS can be saved with one move: eliminate the $110,100 cap on payroll taxes. This would single-handedly fund SS for another 75 years, which means I can get SS and the next generation will have to figure someone else/thing to tax.

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