“From 1990 to 1995, we served as public trustees for Social Security and
Medicare. As a Democrat and a Republican (now an independent), we worked
together on a professional and nonpartisan basis with the other trustees – the
secretaries of health and human services, labor and Treasury – to ensure the
integrity and credibility of the annual reports on these critically important
social insurance programs. [T]he conclusions expressed in this year’s Medicare
report were, to our minds, based on unreasonable assumptions that produced
unrealistic and misleading results. The unwarrantedly optimistic report could
produce a serious misunderstanding of the true financial condition of Medicare
and result in significant public confusion.”