January 10, 2013

Chart of the Day: Medicare Not Really in Such Bad Shape After All

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Austin Frakt passes along this chart, which made the rounds yesterday, illustrating the projected growth of Medicare over the next 20 years:

Scary! Or is it? As Austin points out, most of the growth is simply due to an aging population. No matter how much of a fiscal hawk you are, you simply can’t blame that on out-of-control spending or liberal utopianism. It’s just demographics, and it’s baked into the cake no matter how much we dislike it. This is money we’re going to spend, and the sooner everyone accepts that the better.

Then there’s the “excess” cost growth in red. It amounts to a grand total of three-quarters of a percentage point of GDP by 2035. That’s really….not so much. And even this projection assumes that Obamacare’s IPAB panel, which is designed to rein in cost growth, never gets implemented. [See update below.]

In any case, if this forecast is right, it tells us two things. First, our population is aging and we’re going to pay for that. Deal with it. Second, Medicare is going to have some excess growth above that, and we should look for ways to get that under control. But that excess growth is fairly modest; we already have laws on the books to address some of it if we just have the fortitude to follow through; and healthcare wonks on both the left and right have plenty of sensible ideas for reining it in further.

Healthcare is a problem. But it’s not an insurmountable one. If we could stop wasting time on fiscal cliffs and debt ceiling hysteria and all the other nonsense that consumes us at the moment, there really are things we could do about this. Our future is not the budgetary nightmare that conservatives keep trying to make it out to be.

UPDATE: Actually, it turns out that this projection does assume that IPAB is implemented. It also assumes some fairly substantial cost savings from increased productivity in the healthcare sector. That may be overly optimistic. Austin Frakt has more here.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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