“Much of the claimed benefits for Medicare from the recently passed health-care law — benefits that the president himself again touted on Saturday — are not to be believed”
“Law Will Extend Medicare Fund, Report Says,” was the New York Times headline. “Medicare Funds to Last 12 Years Longer Than Earlier Forecast, Report Says,” was the similar take of the Washington Post. Those two stories were upbeat summaries of what the latest report on Medicare’s long-term financial outlook supposedly revealed.
But was that really the most newsworthy headline here?
How about the fact that the person who compiled all of the data for this report, and knows its contents better than anyone else, utterly repudiated its findings?
That’s right. Richard Foster, the chief actuary of the Medicare program and the man responsible for overseeing the production of the data which forms the basis of this annual report’s forecast, has advised the public — in his official “Statement of Actuarial Opinion” printed at the end of the trustees’ report — not to believe any of the modestly rosy conclusions contained within it.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of this development. Here is the president’s point man for assessing the financial status of Medicare declaring that much of the claimed benefits for Medicare from the recently passed health-care law — benefits that the president himself again touted on Saturday — are not to be believed
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