The beautiful thing about this mess in the eyes of our politicians is that they can claim deniability because they personally didn't vote for it and so can play the blame game while making an even bigger mess to "FIX" it. Medicare has been around so long that there are just a small handful of congress critter left who put it into law and Social Security, those that foisted that upon us are nothing more than myths now.
I believe that it was Madison that pointed out that the Constitution does not give the Federal Government the power to give other people's money to someone that it feels sorry for. Now it's the very underpinning of political power.