WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator Bob Corker, R-Tenn., ranking member of the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging, will chair a hearing entitled “A Time for Solutions: Finding Consensus in the Medicare Reform Debate” on Wednesday, October 12. With the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction considering proposals to reduce federal spending, including possible reforms to Medicare, this hearing will review testimony to identify ideas that can be embraced by both parties to control Medicare spending and extend the solvency of the program.

“Medicare is America’s largest fiscal and health care challenge and is getting more difficult to solve every day we don’t address it. Now is the time to develop consensus around solutions to preserve the program for the 48 million seniors who rely on it today and the generations behind them who will,” Corker said.

Our nation’s projected future deficits and debt are being driven primarily by the unsustainable growth rate in Medicare, which is crowding out spending in other areas of the budget. Medicare, the largest of the federal entitlement programs, provides 48 million seniors with health care and represents 15 percent of the 2011 federal budget. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Medicare spending is expected to grow from $555 billion in 2011 to $903 billion in 2020. With 20 million more seniors reaching retirement age over the next decade and the number of workers per retiree at its lowest level in our history, the financial pressures on Medicare are mounting considerably and will eventually exhaust the program’s resources unless significant changes are implemented soon.

The Medicare trustees released a report in May revealing Medicare possesses $38 trillion in unfunded liabilities and, on its current trajectory, will run out of money to pay full benefits in 2024. This outlook, exacerbated by the aging of our society, can be attributed largely to the increasing cost of health care and structural flaws in Medicare’s financing whereby Americans only pay in one-third of the cost of their expected lifetime benefits. Data from the Urban Institute shows that a dual-earner couple making $43,500 each per year will use an estimated $357,000 in combined Medicare services over a lifetime while contributing a total of just $119,000, including both individual and employer contributions.

To address these major challenges facing our society, a proliferation of bipartisan proposals for entitlement reform and deficit reduction, including plans by the Congressional Budget Office, the Bipartisan Policy Center (Domenici-Rivlin), the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (Bowles-Simpson), and MedPac, among others, have produced a variety of solutions that could help fix the structural flaws in Medicare and protect the program for current and future generations.

To watch the hearing live over the Internet and to access full committee testimony, visit: http://aging.senate.gov/

WHAT:

U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging Hearing
“A Time for Solutions: Finding Consensus in the Medicare Reform Debate”

WHEN:

October 12, 2011
2:00 p.m. ET

WHERE:

U.S. Senate Dirksen Office Building
Dirksen Senate Office Building, Room 562
Washington, D.C., 20510

WHO:

Maya MacGuineas, President of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget

Joseph Antos, Wilson H. Taylor Scholar in Health Care and Retirement Policy, American Enterprise Institute

John Holahan, Director of the Urban Institute Health Policy Research Center

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, President of the American Action Forum and former Director of the Congressional Budget Office

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