Medicare's chief actuary vs. President Obama on the ObamaCare facts.
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There probably isn't a worse job in Washington than Medicare trustee, unpaid Capitol Hill interns included. Every year the trustees issue the gravest warnings about entitlement spending and at best prompt a moment of brow-furrowing before the political class returns to its default state of indifference.
This year's report, issued last week, has more than the usual political meaning because Democrats are hailing it as validation of their claims that ObamaCare will save taxpayers money. The trustee report shows "how the Affordable Care Act is helping to reduce costs and make Medicare stronger," the White House said in a statement.
One problem: That spin ignores the extraordinary companion analysis by chief Medicare actuary Richard Foster that repudiates this conclusion and is the most damning fiscal indictment to date of the Affordable Care Act.
The trustees do estimate the Medicare hospital trust fund will run out of money in 2029, some 12 years later than they estimated last year. (Keep in mind that the trust fund is a meaningless accounting artifact because Medicare was long ago financed in part by general tax revenues.) It's also true that, thanks to ObamaCare's changes under current budget rules, Medicare's unfunded 75-year liability has fallen to about $30.8 trillion from nearly $37 trillion in the previous audit.
Even in Washington, $6.2 trillion is real money. Yet this is a strange excuse for celebration. Democrats wrung about a half-trillion dollars from Medicare over the next decade, but then they turned around and plowed these "savings" into their new middle-class health-care entitlement. It's akin to paying off one credit card with another--while still being deeply in hock on the first.
But then comes the report's final appendix, where Mr. Foster disowns the previous 280-odd pages. Mr. Foster has been Medicare's chief actuary for 15 years, and as such he is required to evaluate the law as written. But as he notes in his appendix, the law as written bears little if any relation to the real world--and thus, he says, the trustee estimates "do not represent a reasonable expectation for actual program operations in either the short range . . . or the long range." In an unprecedented move, he directs readers to a separate "alternative scenario" that his office drew up using more realistic assumptions.
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