Page 19 - Part B News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

The key feature of President Bush's fiscal year 2008 budget request is not its strategy to reach a balanced budget in five years butits focus on long-term entitlement spending.

Medicare’s problem is its subsidy, and the solution—tested and with bipartisan support—is to ensure that it goes only to those who really need it.

8.7% next year. >> yeah, well they were waiting on the inflationary numbers here. this is a yearly adjustment that a lot of people at social security watch closely. the announcement from this morning was that they would be increasing, they would make that cost of living adjustment to the social security payments, about 8.7%. rep, these payments and that change is going to be effective in january and that is substantially higher than the 5.9% adjustment made last year. but again, because inflation is still above 8%, you are seeing some of that high inflation erode even the increase in the socia...

For the next generation of taxpayers and retirees, there is no better option than Medicare premium support. It will guarantee better choices and broader access to quality care, faster innovation, less waste and fraud, and superior cost control.

Medicare is financially unsustainable in its current form. TheMedicare Trustees' 2008 estimate of the program's total excess costs is $85.6 trillion. The Trustees acknowledge an important,flawed assumption used in developing their estimate of excesscosts. If corrected, Medicare's excess costs would increase,underscoring the need to reform Medicare quickly and substantially.