Health Care Blog

Trustees Reports Highlight Continued Progress in Slowing the Growth of Health Care Costs, Need for Congressional Action to Protect Workers with Disabilities

This afternoon, the Trustees of the Social Security and Medicare programs issued their annual reports on the programs’ financial status. Today’s Medicare Trustees Report reaffirms the dramatic improvement in the program’s financial outlook in recent years. Since 2009, the life of the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund has been extended by 13 years and its actuarial deficit reduced by more than four-fifths, thanks in substantial part to reforms in the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The law also improved Medicare’s prescription drug and preventive benefits coverage, increased its focus on quality, and gave the program unprecedented tools to fight fraud. On the eve of Medicare’s 50^th anniversary, the Administration is committed to building on progress to date in moving Medicare toward payment models that reward efficient, high-quality care to ensure that the program can continue to protect the health and financial security of retirees and workers with disabilities for the next 50 years and beyond.

For Social Security, the new Trustees Report confirms that the program as a whole will be able to pay full benefits to retirees, survivors, and workers with disabilities for almost two decades. Today’s report does, however, highlight a long-foreseen imbalance between the two Social Security trust funds that pay disability and retirement benefits, respectively. Due to this imbalance, Congressional action will be needed soon to protect earned and expected benefits for 11 million Social Security disability beneficiaries. The Administration looks forward to working with Congress to rebalance the Social Security program—as has been done on a bipartisan basis many times in the past—to ensure that workers with disabilities and their families receive the full benefits they have earned and need.

The remainder of this blog post discusses the findings of each of today’s reports in greater detail.

The Letter the President Carried:

Today at 2:30 pm ET in Nashville, TN, President Obama is participating in a discussion on how we can build on the progress we've made under the Affordable Care Act. Watch live:

A letter from Natoma Canfield, a woman from Ohio that President Barack Obama met who didn’t have health insurance, hangs on the wall in the hall between the Oval Office and the President's Private Office in the West Wing. June 28, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)

More than five years ago, as Congress engaged in heated debates over the Affordable Care Act, President Obama carried a single piece of paper with him every single day: this letter from Natoma Canfield.