Quote of note:

…ambitious as the administration's plans for private accounts may be, "fixing" Social Security is by far the easier task. Medicare faces the same relentless demographic pressures as Social Security -- plus the burden of rapidly rising health care costs. Another may be that grappling with Medicare will require thinking about the nation's irrational health care system as a whole, a task for which the administration and Congress appear to have little stomach.

The Bigger Problem
Monday, December 27, 2004; Page A28

THE PROGRAM NOW consumes one-eighth of the federal budget; in 10 years that share is expected to grow to one-fifth. It will consume more money this year than enters the Treasury through payroll taxes. By 2019, if current spending patterns hold, the trust fund that finances the biggest part of the program will be out of cash.

The program is not Social Security but Medicare. Those frightening figures emerged during what might be called the Medicare Moment of President Bush's economic summit -- an official pause to recognize the problem and then crisply move on. "My role is to say: 'Remember health care, remember Medicare,' " said Dr. William Roper, dean of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. Indeed, the figures tell the story. Medicare is a bigger problem than Social Security: its hospital care trust fund is on track to go bust two or even three decades before the Social Security surplus runs out; its unfunded liabilities dwarf those of Social Security -- $27.7 trillion over the next 75 years, compared with $3.7 trillion liability for Social Security.