August 14, 2017
Trump’s Medicare trustees recently released their report on the health of Social Security and Medicare. Trump’s trustees reported that there was a sharp improvement in the projections of Medicare’s finances during the Obama administration – this is notable because it signals bipartisan agreement that the projected shortfall is markedly smaller than what policymakers were looking at a decade ago.
Some critics of the Obama administration questioned the validity of this projection and accused the Trustees, four out of six of whom are political appointees of the president, of manipulating the numbers for political purposes. These critics claimed that Obama’s trustees were deliberately understating the financial problems facing Medicare over its planning horizon.
For this reason, the fact that the 2017 Trustees report largely confirms the drop in the shortfall projected by the Obama trustees is very important. In fact, the 2017 report shows an even better picture for Medicare, with a projected shortfall of just 0.64 percent of payroll over the 75-year planning period.
This new projection implies that almost 82 percent of the projected shortfall was eliminated by economic and policy changes during the Obama years. In fact, this figure understates the true improvement since the 75-year horizon starting in 2017 includes years that are considerably worse for the program demographically than 75-year horizon that began in 2007.
