If you need any more evidence that the growth in health-care costs is unsustainable, take a look at two reports out this week.

Today, the Medicare trustees issued their annual assessment of the government insurance program’s fiscal health. The prognosis: the trust fund (covering hospital stays) will be exhausted in 2024, as the WSJ reports. That’s five years earlier than they predicted last year; the sluggish economy has led to lower payroll taxes, but health costs keep going up.

And even that forecast comes with an asterisk. The long-term outlook for the trust fund and the Medicare Part B program, which pays for physician’ services, depends on assumptions that are “inevitably highly uncertain,” the report says:

New technologies and interventions will continue to expand the capabilities of medicine and to affect the cost of health care in ways that are difficult to predict. Private stakeholders are redoubling their efforts to curb cost growth, but the extent of their success and the effects of these endeavors on Medicare

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