US Capitol Capsule: Health reform extends Medicare solvency, but programme to go bust by 2024
This article was originally published in Scrip
Executive Summary
Unsurprisingly, the glass half-full or half-empty debate ran along party lines on 13 May when the US government released the annual financial review of Medicare by the programme's board of trustees, which concluded that while Medicare has sufficient resources to meet its obligations for at least the next decade, the hospital insurance (HI) trust fund is now estimated to be exhausted in 2024 – five years earlier than last year's estimate.