Medicare's Hospital Program Went Broke in 2008. Nobody Noticed.

Medicare is politically untouchable. Old people have been promised coverage, and no politician is going to tell granny she must fork over her life's savings to pay for her own health care expenses. Not yet, anyway. Not this year.

But what about the famous Medicare trust fund? Whenever we read about Medicare's projected deficit, it always refers to Medicare's trust fund. It never says this: "Medicare's trust fund is 100% filled with unmarketable IOUs from the U.S. Treasury." Yet that is the situation. Medicare's trust fund is just like Social Security's.

Fraud, abuse and corruption are rampant in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. There's too much OP (other people's) money and too little oversight and too much temptation for politicians and bureaucrats with sticky fingers and health care providers who rig the system and patients who use their hypochondria to demand unnecessary medical attention. Politicians will not fix it because, in order to do so, they would have to admit failure.