These are the bullets that are heading straight for the heart of the United States. The Medicare bullet is much larger and will not reach the skin surface until 2012. It won't reach the heart until sometime after 2016. Fortunately, this bullet is easily deflected by simply abolishing a program in which nobody has their life savings invested. And in spite of the rhetoric and hype, the evidence does not support the concept that Medicare saves lives. Somewhere in the vicinity of 1986 HCFA published a report that summarized the first 20 years of Medicare results. It has since been buried to the point of being very difficult to retrieve, but what the data showed is that on average, 80% of all Medicare benefits were paid in the last 90 days of each beneficiaries life. Medicare was not "paying for health care", Medicare was paying the costs of allowing beneficiaries to die in hospitals.
Social Security is in a different ball park. Millions of Americans have been forced to "invest" in a pyramid scheme designed to resemble an annuity, but where incoming cash is paid out to current beneficiaries instead of being saved and compounded like a real annuity. When today's payers retire, there is no pool of savings and compounded interest available to withdraw as their benefits. If they receive benefits at all, it will have to come from people willing to continue paying into a program that makes no intellectual or economic sense.
Social Security must be ended, but it cannot be fairly abolished with the stroke of a pen in the same fashion as Medicare. While SS is and was unconstitutional and was involuntary, it still carries a moral and implied contract between generations of Americans that can and should be honored in a fair and reasonable format modeled after the Cato Plan to Privatize Social Security.
It is my opinion, that because of the millions of minds that actually believe they have a right to have their health care paid by somebody else regardless of the costs involved, and regardless of the fact that whatever they have paid in taxes/premiums is insignificant when compared to the benefits that they have been promised in law, that it will be easier to deal with Medicare and more practical, only after proving that Social Security can be ended voluntarily and equitably.
It is reasonable to believe that the Republic of the United States is going to rise or fall dependent on how we deal with these two issues. If socialism survives, the US won't. It is not necessary to take my word for this; here are the opinions of reliable experts.