51% of Medicare expenditures comes from the General Fund. By law, 75% of Medicare Parts B and D (SMI) are funded thru the General Fund. The premiums only cover 25% of the costs. Estimated expenditures for SMI in 2011 is $295 billion, 75% of which comes from the General Fund. The HI trust fund (Medicare Part A) has been cashing in its IOUs since 2008 to make up the shortfall from payroll taxes and payouts. And SS is also in the red cashing in its IOUs to make payments. The bottom line is that receipts are far from adequate to cover Medicare and SS.
SS receipts are even or close to their expenditures last I heard though I imagine things have gotten worse (and Obama reduced receipts recently- Dems can’t help raiding SS).
Didn’t know medicare was funded that way, I wonder why?
Anyway it still comes out surprisingly close IMHO!
A horribly expensive part of Medicare is payment for ESRD. Dialysis costs about $1200 every time you walk into the clinic (more or less - my bill for March was $9600 but I was on the machine only twice weekly to save money). I finally got Medicare straightened out (I had to!! My private insurance insisted that BY LAW, after 30 months of [expensive] medical payments, they had to become secondary to Medicare and that they would only pay 20% of the cost of my care from now on). My Medicare “premium” is all of $120 a month, while my COBRA payments are $629 per month.
ESRD cost Medicare $28 billion last year for about 500K people including an unknown number of illegal aliens.