Medicare and Medicaid’s Budget Challenges

CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS

By Lester Feder, Ellen-Marie Whelan | February 20, 2009

Discussing long-term budget challenges earlier this year, President Barack Obamaremarked, “Social Security, we can solve…. The big problem is Medicare, which is unsustainable…. We can’t solve Medicare in isolation from the broader problems of the health-care system.”

The president is right. Medicare, the entitlement program that provides health coverage for seniors, presents some of the country’s most serious budget challenges. Medicare enrollment, like Social Security, will grow substantially as baby boomers start to become eligible for retirement in 2011. This demographic shift will also strain Medicaid, Medicare’s sister program for low-income families, because much of the program’s budget goes to cover seniors made destitute by the cost of long-term care.    VIEW ARTICLE HERE

Posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 10:06 pm and is filed under ACCESS TO HEALTH CARE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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