Biden, leaders must work to avoid a disaster

The Courant managed to stumble on some truth in its March 8 edition.

The Page 1, top-of-the-fold headline that day was “State hospitals in fiscal peril.” It goes on to describe how Connecticut hospitals, even today while Medicare and Medicaid are “fully funded,” are in a fiscal crisis that will only get worse as the American population ages and moves from privately funded health insurance to Medicare, which, like Medicaid, only reimburses hospitals a fraction of their actual costs. To make things worse, by 2028 Medicare will no longer be “fully funded.”

At the bottom of the same page there was another article, this one entitled, “Biden offers plan to fund Medicare.” It describes how President Joe Biden is proposing to increase Medicare taxes on the wealthy, which would increase Medicare revenues by more than $117 billion over the coming 10 years. Problem solved, right? Not at all, and Biden knows it. The latest Congressional Budget Office estimate forecasts the deficit for Medicare over the next 30 years to total $48 trillion, which doesn’t even include the interest on the additional debt that will pile up due to that shortfall.

We are sitting on a demographic time bomb that, when it explodes, will destroy Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security as we know them.

That is a simple fact. It is time for our political leadership, beginning with President Biden, to stop treating this crisis like a political tennis ball to be lobbed back and forth over some ideological net and work in a serious and truly bipartisan spirit for once, and actually do something about it.