Josh Barro, Columnist

Romney and Obama are Both Medicare Double-Counters

August 24, 2012 at 2:00 PM UTC

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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One of the Obama administration's talking points in favor of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has been that the law extends the solvency of the Medicare trust fund. By slowing the growth of Medicare spending, the law postpones the date when the Medicare Trust Fund will be exhausted to 2024 from 2016.

Conservatives have typically responded that this claim involves double counting. The law cuts Medicare spending in order to make funds available to finance and expansion of Medicaid and subsidies for middle-income people to buy private health insurance. If the money is being spent on a new benefit, it can't also be used to shore up Medicare.