Fix is hard for Medicare, Social Security

Medicare fund to be depleted in 2017
"What's missing here is not ideas, it is political will," said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., one of a growing number of lawmakers hopping aboard the commission idea. He suggests Congress could begin debating the commission legislation later this year.

Federal overseers said this month that the Medicare fund will be depleted in 2017, just eight years from now and two years earlier than estimated just a year ago. The Social Security trust fund will be exhausted in 2037, four years earlier than predicted a year ago.

People are living longer, which adds to the costs. Some 80 million baby boomers — born from 1946 to 1964 — will become eligible for Social Security and Medicare benefits over the next two decades.

Prospects for establishing an entitlement reform commission may not be great now, but should improve once the economy improves and Congress can turn its attention away from bank bailouts and stimulus spending, said David Walker, president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. The group, which promotes fiscal responsibility, is a strong supporter of the commission approach.

'Starts making tough decisions'
He said that while Britain may be ahead of the U.S. in facing a possible credit downgrades, "we may be headed in the same direction unless Washington wakes up and starts making tough decisions."

A bipartisan commission chaired by Alan Greenspan in 1983 made a set of recommendations — accepted by Congress and President Ronald Reagan — to head off a looming crisis in Social Security. It pushed the day of reckoning decades ahead by increasing Social Security taxes, cutting some benefits and raising the age for retirees to start collecting full benefits.

The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New York Democrat, was co-chairman of a panel created by Bush in 2001 to review Social Security and suggest ways to shore up its finances, including partially privatizing the system.

Bush ignored most of the commission's work but latched onto its call for allowing younger workers to set up personal investment accounts to invest in the stock market and made it part of his 2005 effort — which failed — to overhaul the system.

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