United States Government Required Supplementary Information (Unaudited) For the Years Ended September 30, 2012, and 2011

Conclusion

The United States took a potentially significant step towards fiscal sustainability in 2010 by reforming its system of health insurance through enactment of the ACA. The legislated changes for Medicare, Medicaid, and other health coverage hold the prospect of lowering the long-term growth trend for health care costs and significantly reducing the long-term fiscal gap. Furthermore, enactment of the Budget Control Act in August 2011 placed limits on future discretionary spending and established a process to further reduce projected deficits by at least $1.2 trillion from 2013 through 2021. But even with the new laws, the projections in this Report indicate that if policy remains unchanged the debt-to-GDP ratio will continually increase over the next 75 years and beyond, which implies current policies are not sustainable and must ultimately change. Subject to the important caveat that policy changes are not so abrupt that they slow the economic recovery, the sooner policies are put in place to avert these trends, the smaller are the revenue increases and/or spending decreases necessary to return the Government to a sustainable fiscal path.