Seniors who were worried about their next Social Security checks or Medicare benefits can rest easy, for now. The debt ceiling is raised, and the Treasury Department will be able to pay the nation’s bills at least to the end of 2012. Americans in their retirement years, which include most of the nation’s mesothelioma patients, will continue to receive benefits for the foreseeable future.
Many lawmakers had refused to vote for the debt ceiling increase without a package of spending cuts attached to it. Will Social Security and Medicare be affected by those cuts? Maybe.
The deal spells out $1 trillion in spending cuts, but none of these cuts are to Medicare or Social Security.
In addition, the deal provides for a special commission to identify another $1.5 trillion in spending cuts. This commission must report to Congress by November 23. Congress will not be allowed to change the recommendations and must give this package of cuts an up-or-down vote by December 23. Obviously, there is no way to know what the commission will recommend.
The deal includes a “trigger” in case Congress cannot agree to pass the recommended cuts. If the cut package fails, $1.2 trillion in spending cuts automatically go into effect. Half of these cuts would come from the defense budget. The non-defense cuts come from several parts of government. Social Security, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, military retirement pay, and some other programs are off the table and will not be cut.
However, the “trigger” includes significant cuts to Medicare. These cuts are not supposed to reduce benefits. However, Medicare providers would see their payments reduced 2 percent across the board. Some health care experts fear that such cuts could cause health care providers to cut back Medicare services or even eliminate Medicare patients entirely.
The “trigger” was set up to cause politicians of both parties to think hard before voting no on the commission’s recommended spending cuts. The theory is that Republicans will not want to cut defense spending and Democrats will not want to cut Medicare. Of course, it’s possible that politicians will decide whatever the commission wants to cut would be worse.
The debt ceiling deal as signed leaves a lot of details to be worked out. There could be many unintended consequences. But Social Security and Medicare won’t disappear just yet.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011 at 9:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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