Last week, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Secretary of Labor, and the Secretary of the Treasury used their position as Social Security trustees to push the issue of overhauling social security by creating private accounts at the annual trustees report release. But while all the press attention went to Social Security, the real elephant in the room went unnoticed: Medicare, which provides medical insurance for the elderly, is surging towards insolvency, and it has yet to get the attention it deserves.

Yes, the trustees’ report predicted that the Social Security trust fund will start losing money in 2017, and that it will not be able to pay full benefits by 2041, both estimates that are one year prior to earlier estimates. But the reality is that we control all the variables in social security: inflow in the form of tax rate and amount of income subject to tax, and outflow in the form of the amount of benefits, the rate of benefit growth and when you can start receiving benefits. With Medicare, we only control the inflow, and the outflow is rising incredibly fast as overall costs of health care explode.

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