Want High-Quality Universal Health Coverage? Fix Medicare First and Use It as a Model

By Maggie Mahar, Health Beat
Posted on August 2, 2008, Printed on August 3, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/93357/

This article originally appeared on Health Beat.

Thanks to the unbridled rise in health care prices, Medicare is going broke. As I mentioned in a recent post, four years ago the Medicare trust fund that pays for hospital stays started to run out of money. In 2004 the fund began paying out more than it takes in through payroll taxes.

"Since then, the balance in the fund, combined with interest income on that balance, has kept the fund solvent. But in just 11 years, it will be exhausted," the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPac) reported in March. "Revenues from payroll taxes collected in that year will cover only 79 percent of projected benefit expenditures." And each year after 2019, the shortfall will grow larger.