WASHINGTON — With the presidential campaign going full tilt, a new government report on a big national problem is usually followed by volleys of rhetoric from the candidates. But on Tuesday, when the annual report on the precarious state of Medicare and Social Security came out, the reaction was not exactly deafening.
The two programs on which millions of elderly Americans depend are apparently just too hot to handle -- especially since any realistic solution is likely to involve a politically unpalatable mix of higher taxes and lower benefits.
As a result, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the presumed Republican presidential nominee, had little to say when the latest numbers were released projecting Medicare going into the red by 2019 and Social Security following in 2041. The Democratic contenders, Sens. Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, also sidestepped the issue.
"Everybody knows that there are a couple of 800-pound gorillas under the rug, but nobody wants to talk about them because that is not the route to the Oval Office," said economist Robert D. Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute public policy center. "The situation is unsustainable in the long run, but the long run is in the future, and our political system operates very much in the present."
Yet baby boomers will start retiring and signing up for Medicare in 2011 -- during the next president's first term. And the program faces double jeopardy from rapidly rising healthcare costs and an aging society. Indeed, the trustees' report released Tuesday showed that Medicare spending will surpass Social Security in 2028, and grow to almost double the cost of the pension program in 2082.
Of the three candidates, McCain is running as the most fiscally conservative. He criticized the Medicare prescription benefit when it was created in 2003, saying that Congress and President Bush failed to provide for the long-term cost.
Candidate McCain has called benefit programs "unsustainable" and promised to work with Democrats to find solutions. But he has not laid out his own ideas in detail. And he certainly has not indicated a willingness to consider tax increases.
But tax increases will likely have to be part of any solution.
A president "can't take anything off the table," said David M. Walker, former head of the congressional Government Accountability Office and a leading advocate of reforming entitlements, as the benefit programs are known.
