Medicare spending set to nearly double in 10 years and Medicaid and ACA spending up a third, CBO says, just as Trump’s tax cuts shorten their life span

Federal health care spending has reached a historic turning point. It is now the single largest category of federal expenditures, having surpassed other spending categories including Social Security, national defense, and interest payments made to chip away at the national debt. If current trajectories hold, health care will be eating up an enormous share of the country’s spending for years to come.

The government is on track to spend over $26 trillion on major health programs through 2036, according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s review of the country’s most recent fiscal outlook, published Wednesday. 

And the numbers are astonishing. The surge will be led by Medicare, which is projected to double in cost from $988 billion in 2025 to almost $2 trillion by 2036. Over the next decade spending on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program is also expected to grow by 36%, while subsidies for the Affordable Care Act marketplaces are forecasted to rise by a third from their current levels. It adds up to a fiscal trajectory that threatens to crowd out other spending and destabilize the nation’s primary safety nets.

This explosive growth in spending coincides with a dramatic deterioration in the solvency of the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund, which covers essential inpatient hospital and nursing facility care. Tha...