May 1, 2006 4:31PM # Hey Buddy, Can You Spare $86 Trillion? By [Michael F. Cannon](https://www.cato.org/people/michael-f-cannon) --- SHARE That’s how much Congress would have to put in an interest-bearing account today to cover the gap between the Social Security and Medicare benefits it has promised, and its ability to actually keep those promises. The trustees of the [Medicare](http://www.cms.hhs.gov/ReportsTrustFunds/downloads/tr2006.pdf) and [Social Security](http://www.socialsecurity.gov/OACT/TR/TR06/tr06.pdf) programs released their annual reports at 3pm today. A brief rundown: > 1. The unfunded liability of the Social Security program grew by 20 percent (from $12.8 trillion to $15.3 trillion) while Congress dithered over reform proposals. > > 2. But the Social Security gap is still smaller than the unfunded liability of just the Medicare prescription drug program, which weighs in at a robust $16.2 trillion. > > 3. The total unfunded liability of Medicare topped *$70 trillion* (It’s actually $70.8 trillion. Round up or down to suit your taste.) > > 4. The trustees’ estimate of the unfunded liability of the Medicare drug program actually shrank 11 percent from their 2005 estimate of $18.2 trillion. But that reduction was more than offset by a 2 percent increase in the unfunded liability of the physician insurance part of Medicare (from $25.8 trillion to $26.2 trillion) and a 16 percent surge in the unfunded liability of the hospital part of Medicare (from $24.4 trillion to $28.4 trillion). All told, Medicare’s problems are over four times the size of Social Security’s. ##### Related Tags [Health Care](https://www.cato.org/health-care), [Social Security](https://www.cato.org/topic/social-security), [Tax and Budget Policy](https://www.cato.org/tax-budget-policy) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).