The New York Times has an article discussing the long term budget issues regarding Medicare. This question and answer succinctly describes the financial problem:



Q. Don’t most Americans pay for their Medicare benefits, through payroll taxes over their working lives?

A. No, and it is not even close. Two married 66-year-olds with roughly average earnings over their lives will end up paying about $122,000 in dedicated Medicare taxes through the payroll tax, including the part their employers pay, according to Eugene Steuerle, Stephanie Rennane and Caleb B. Quakenbush of the Urban Institute. That married couple can expect to receive about three times as much — $387,000, adjusted for inflation — in benefits. The projected gap is even larger for younger people because of growing health costs.

In short, the single biggest cause of the long-term deficit is that most people receive much more from Medicare than they give to it.





Full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/us/politics/debt-reckonin...