Medicare and Social Security are doomed unless a bipartisan effort saves them
Quin Hillyer
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New Congressional Budget Office projections for Social Security and Medicare ought to convince President Joe Biden and Congress to create a new commission on entitlement reform.
Otherwise, disaster looms.
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The CBO projects Medicare trust fund insolvency by 2030 and Social Security trust fund insolvency by 2033. And unfunded future liabilities for these programs comprise a huge portion of the $93 trillion in total unfunded liabilities facing the U.S. government by the turn of the next century. For comparison, that’s well over three times the size of the current U.S. economy.
As described by the respected and nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a private group, there is a plethora of options for warding off these crises, but all of them involve at least a small amount of shared responsibility. One hesitates to say “shared sacrifice” because most of the options require merely small adjustments in formulas and taxes that almost nobody would notice unless specifically looking for them. A combination of any five or six of these options could share the responsibility among various income groups in ways that both public and private budgets could handle with barely a hiccup.
For now, though, it’s less important to choose options than it is to choose a method for adopting whatever options end up being chosen. Cynics often scoff at the formation of yet another government “commission,” portraying it as a fig leaf to cover the problem until later. But the truth is, sometimes, commissions work well. So too can informal, bipartisan working groups that act in the same spirit as formal commissions.
In 1983, Republican Sen. Bob Dole and Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan spearheaded a grand bargain on Social Security, backed by then-President Ronald Reagan, that extended the life of that program by nearly four decades, with almost no ill effects on economic growth. In the early 1990s, the military base-closing commission achieved signal success, making the armed services more efficient while saving taxpayer dollars and catalyzing effective private-sector use of the bases being closed.
And in the mid-1990s, a wonderfully bipartisan commission on Medicare was right on the verge of agreeing to a creative and constructive rescue of the seniors’ health plan, only for then-President Bill Clinton and several of his key appointees to back off at the last minute. Alas, Clinton suddenly needed to shore up his more liberal “base” to fight the Lewinsky-related impeachment effort. It is reasonable to believe that, absent the Lewinsky scandal, Medicare’s finances would already be secure well past 2050 rather than facing insolvency by 2030.
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Somewhere, somehow, lawmakers from across the spectrum need to find their “inner statesman” and reach across party and ideological divisions. Somehow, today’s Doles and Moynihans must identify themselves and bring others on board as well.
To avoid disaster, we need an entitlement commission. The U.S. public should be entitled to leaders willing to stand tall against economic collapse.