Macho men are wrong on Social Security
The sleight of hand is that if Social Security is pulled out from the group with Medicare and Medicaid, and instead placed in the category with everything else, the charts look almost exactly the same. Indeed, any number of valuable social programmes disliked by the right – be they benefits for veterans, support for early years education, or foreign aid – could be lumped together with Medicare and Medicaid, to show that the growth in cost of the three programmes combined is also out of control.
Without the trickery, the real story behind the fiscal debate is simple: it is the costs of Medicare and Medicaid that are projected to rise hugely. This is because the cost of healthcare is projected to grow quickly too. That is happening everywhere else in the world, but the US is in an especially bad position: it already pays more than twice as much on healthcare per person when compared with other rich countries, and gains little obvious benefit for this expense. Worse, per person costs in the US are projected to rise even further, relative to both GDP and costs in other countries.
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