Medicare Overseers Expect Costs to Soar in Coming Decades
By ROBERT PEAR
Published: March 24, 2004
WASHINGTON, March 23 — Medicare's financial condition has significantly deteriorated, partly because of exploding health costs and partly because of the new Medicare law, the government reported on Tuesday....
(Senator Kerry is quoted as saying: "In just one year, George Bush's reckless policies have sped Medicare seven years closer to bankruptcy." Bush administration officials, according to the article, maintain that the financial problems would be worse if Democratic drug legislation, costing twice as much, had been passed.)
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The (Medicare) board of trustees consists of four administration officials and two public representatives, (John L. Palmer, a former dean of the Maxwell School at Syracuse University) and Thomas R. Saving, an economist at Texas A&M University.
In a joint statement, the public trustees said that surging Medicare costs, combined with the new drug benefit, "raise serious doubt about the sustainability of Medicare under current financing arrangements."
Moreover, the full board said, the fiscal outlook may be worse than the official projections indicate, because the estimates are based on the unrealistic assumption that the average Medicare fee for doctors' services will be cut about 5 percent each year from 2006 to 2012, as required under current rules. Doctors say they will lobby Congress to prevent such cuts.
Though issued by the Bush administration, the Medicare report was prepared mainly by the office of the actuary, Richard S. Foster, a longtime civil servant who recently stirred up a political row when he said he had been ordered to withhold some of his cost estimates from Congress. In the last year, he wrote, "the financial status of the hospital insurance trust fund has deteriorated significantly."...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/24/politics/24BENE.html
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