On the recordMarch 2, 2022
Mr. President, imagine this. You are a CEO of a company, and one day your CFO comes into your office with bad news. The company's costs are rapidly growing, and you aren't bringing in enough money to keep pace with the rising costs. The solution here is simple: come up with a plan to reduce costs and continue serving your customers and honoring your agreements while ensuring that the company can stay afloat. If you don't adapt and evolve, you fail and go out of business. Most Americans understand that. Unfortunately, Congress is not like most Americans. We are in charge of running Medicare, and for decades, the cost of Medicare has risen dramatically, but Congress has no plan to address future costs. And now we have Medicare's Board of Trustees reporting that the hospital insurance trust fund, the fund which supports Medicare Part A, will be insolvent in 2026. You can see here is where we are. In just 4 short years--in just 4 short years--we are going to run out of money to keep paying for services for Americans most in need. We are talking about things like emergency surgery, in-home healthcare, and hospice care. By 2030, 4 years after insolvency, the trust fund will be $335 billion in debt. Medicare Part A cannot pay when it lacks funds. What makes matters worse, the Medicare trustees have been warning about this for years. They have told us that Medicare Part A hasn't met even the most basic short-term goals for fiscal health since 2003.…





