The talking heads have been out claiming that Medicare and Medicaid spending has “gone down” – some of them have claimed this on a “per-capita” basis, others just generally. That’s a lie, it’s a documented lie, and yet no member of the media has challenged these bald-faced lies despite the numerical facts being available to literally anyone with no more than 30 seconds of effort. In the most-recent Treasury Statement (which is canonically correct when it comes to government spending) this fiscal year to date Medicare and Medicaid have spent $1,034,867 (millions); that is, $1.035 trillion. The entire government spent $2,869,374, so this amounts to more than one-third of the total, 36% to be exact.

Last year to the same point in the fiscal year these two programs consumed $950,861.

That is, this fiscal year spending increased 8.83% on a comparable period basis.

Last full fiscal year (September 2014-2015) said spending rose 9.25%.

The prior fiscal (September 2013-2014) said spending rose 6.63% and the year prior to that it rose 5.74%.

There has been no “decrease”; in point of fact it has accelerated by approximately one third in the last two years over the previous two!

This could have been determined in literally 30 seconds by any “journalist” that cared to look.

Nobody cared from either side of the political and media aisle.

This rate of acceleration will, as I have repeatedly pointed out, bankrupt the Federal Government within the next administration’s term. It will in fact exceed all current federal spending within the next 10 years. Neither of these events will actually come to pass because you cannot have a government when you can’t pay the light bill in Washington DC.

PS: Socializing medicine will not fix any of this; it will simply shift all of it to the federal government which will be driven into either fiscal insolvency or cut off services to tens of millions of Americans who will then, as a consequence, die. It will be interesting to see this unravel.

Any serious reform needs cost controls. Obamacare has none, except some vague hand-waving about market forces, so we just got marginally more people enjoying the ever rising cost of health care. In a way it made things worse by assuring those invested in the status quo that it is okay to keep adding more procedures and more specialists to the system, who all get a feeding slot at the carcass.