Podcast Center
Video Center
Webcasts
Resource Center
Events
August 09, 2010 at 08:00 PM
The Boards of Trustees for Social Security and Medicare released their annual financial status reports on the two programs Thursday, August 5, and warned that while the outlook for Medicare has “improved substantially” because of program changes made in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as amended by the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, the outlook for Social Security is “little changed” from last year, with the short term outlook “worsened by a deeper recession than was projected last year.”
At the press briefing on August 5 where the reports were released, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner said that Social Security benefit payments are expected to “exceed tax revenue for the first time this year, six years earlier than was projected last year, but the improving economy is expected to result in rough balance between Social Security taxes and expenditures for several years before the retirement of the baby boom generation swells the beneficiary population and causes deficits to grow rapidly.”
He went on to say that “it is projected that tax and interest income will be sufficient to pay benefits through 2024, after which the Trust Fund will be drawn down until depleted in 2037, the same date of Trust Fund exhaustion projected last year. After 2037, it is expected that tax income will be sufficient to finance more than three quarters of scheduled benefits.”
The long-run financial challenges facing Social Security and those that remain for Medicare “should be addressed soon,” the trustees wrote in their report. “If action is taken sooner rather than later, more options will be available and more time will be available to phase in changes so that those affected have adequate time to prepare.”
