You, like your invented number, are full of bullship. It's no wonder you can't understand how your wife can save money by spending it. 35 TRILLION over what time period, the next 1,000 years.
Source and quotes:
http://www.heritage.org/research/healthcare/bg1849.cfm
"The true significance of the latest CMS estimate is that this number is the taxpayers’ first glimpse of the drug entitlement’s enormous cost, which will soon grow dramatically as the baby-boom generation retires. These drug costs will aggravate the already enormous unfunded liabilities of the entire Medicare program. For example:
"Taxpayers will face an estimated $29.7 trillion in unfunded Medicare liabilities. According to the latest Medicare Trustees Report, the estimated total of unfunded Medicare benefits increased by $2 trillion in just one year. Taxpayers will pay trillions of dollars to cover the Medicare drug costs. The latest Medicare trustees’ estimate of unfunded drug entitlement liabilities alone is $8.7 trillion over a 75-year period."
"Taxpayers will pay an increasing share of their income taxes just to keep Medicare afloat. Under current law and assumptions, Dr. Thomas Saving, a former Medicare public trustee (his term expired after the 2005 Trustees Report was issued), estimates that the program will consume 25 percent of all federal income taxes by 2020 and 50 percent of all federal income taxes by 2040."
The Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) requires that the government calculate a standard type of unfunded liability called a 'closed-group liability.' The closed-group measure assumes that Social Security and Medicare will be closed to all new entrants. It then determines what today's workers and retirees are due to receive in future benefits over and above what those same workers and retirees are due to pay in future contributions.
My source for the 35 trillion was an article at Vanguard: Interview: Can you count on Social Security?
"Professor Mitchell: The current unfunded liability of Social Security is about $11 trillion. That is the additional money needed to pay current promised benefits. By contrast, Medicare's unfunded liabilities are gargantuan, about $66 trillion. It is ironic that when Medicare Part D, the drug bill, passed, this boosted Medicare's underfunding problem by about $35 trillion. Yet this was never mentioned when the bill was passed―by either political party."
While I'm sure there are a lot of assumptions about the rate of increase in Medicare costs and in future payroll taxes collected, which make that figure little more than a very rough guess (I'm no accountant) we've got enough history with the federal government's entitlement spending estimates to know that they seldom underestimate costs.
But I don't need to be an accountant to know that this massive new drug entitlement isn't going to be offset by reductions in Medicare spending overall--that just fails the smell test!