“At a time when someare calling for a complete government takeover of the Americanhealth-care system, the Medicare trustees have delivered a dose ofreality,” CMS's Seema Verma said. (Photographer: PeteMarovich/Bloomberg)

The Trump administration's top Medicare official used an annualreport on the program's fiscal outlook to attack proposals by someDemocrats to expand government health-care coverage to allAmericans.

The federal trust fund that finances much of the health-careprogram for the elderly and disabled is projected to run out in2026, the same year forecast in the most recent projectionspublished in June, trustees for Medicare said in a reportMonday.

Related: Social Security's about to pay out more than ittakes in — for the first time in decades

“At a time when some are calling for a complete government takeover of the American health-caresystem, the Medicare trustees have delivered a dose of reality,”Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and MedicaidServices, said in an emailed statement.

The yearly gauges of Medicare's fiscal health are wonky,technical analyses, watched mostly by economists, actuaries andpolicymakers. But the release of the report also gives politiciansan opportunity to use it as a rhetorical weapon.

Verma wasted no time. Moments after the official report wasreleased, her office released a statement criticizing the idea ofMedicare for All — a proposal the report doesn't even mention.Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and several other candidatesrunning for the 2020 Democratic nomination want to expand a versionof the program to provide free health care to all Americans.

“Stripping around 180 million Americans of private coverage andadding them to Medicare won't fix the problem” of Medicare's fiscaloutlook, Verma said.

'Harmful policies'

Democrats blamed Republicans for the looming Medicare shortfall.The trust fund “has not recovered from years of Republicans'harmful policies,” Representative Richard Neal of Massachusetts,chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said in astatement. “Americans pay into these essential programs throughouttheir working lives, and they expect to receive the benefitsthey've earned.”

The updated projection arrives as Medicare takes a central rolein the debate about the future of American health care. Republicansand some executives in the health-insurance industry warn that sucha proposal could disrupt the economy and force roughly half theAmerican population from the employer health plans they currentlyhave.

The prospect of Medicare for All replacing private insurance,however remote, helped send health stocks tumbling last week. Theselloff followed an upbeat earnings report by UnitedHealth GroupInc., the largest and first health-insurance company to reportfirst-quarter results.

UnitedHealth Chief Executive Officer Dave Wichmann said Medicarefor All would be a “wholesale disruption of American health care”that would destabilize the nation's health system and incur asevere economic cost.

Medicare provides government health insurance to about 60million Americans who are over 65 or disabled, at a cost of about$700 billion last year. The part of the program that pays forhospitalization, known as Part A, relies on a trust fundreplenished by dedicated payroll taxes.

As expenditures from that trust fund exceed tax revenue, theamount available for Medicare to pay hospitals graduallydecreases.

The trust-fund-linked hospital payments account for less thanhalf of Medicare's total spending. Other parts of the Medicareprogram that pay for physicians and drugs don't depend on the trustfund. They're financed through a combination of general tax revenueand premiums paid by beneficiaries.

Read more: 

• Medicare for All: Where the 2020 presidentialcandidates stand
• 4 approaches to expanding health care (and only oneis Medicare for All)
• Medicare for All sound too extreme? Try plan B:Medicare for America

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