The package that Congress finally passed, however, also included revisions approved to win House support.
The administration official said that passage last month of the health care overhaul legislation had made the trustees report obsolete. This official said the decision was made to incorporate all of the changes made by the legislation to better reflect reality.
The new health care law seeks to guarantee health insurance coverage for nearly all Americans while cracking down on insurance industry abuses.
It also promises to reduce federal deficits by an estimated $143 billion over a decade.
Last year’s report of the trustees for Social Security and Medicare, the government’s two biggest benefit programs, said that the Social Security trust fund would be depleted by 2041 and the Medicare trust fund would be depleted by 2019.
The trustees warned that the financial pressures would begin much sooner when the programs begin paying out more in benefits each year than they collect in taxes. Officials with the Congressional Budget Office say that Social Security will start paying more in benefits than it collects in payroll taxes this year for the first time since the 1980s.
Supporters of the new health care overhaul believe it will have a favorable impact on both Medicare and Social Security, extending the life of both trust funds.
The benefits would occur in large part through lowering health costs by expanding the pool of people buying insurance coverage.
For Medicare, that would result in a direct benefit in lower medical bills while the boost to Social Security would occur in an indirect way. If employers see their costs for health insurance fall, they would have more money to spend on employee salaries.
Higher salaries would mean a larger amount of wages that would be subject to the Social Security payroll tax.
