Warning newcomers that it is a Ponzi scheme will not balance the books. And when you say "due", do you mean predictable costs of care, which means you will need to borrow a multi-trillion $ deficit immediately, or do you mean personal contributions, in which case current recipients' contributions were enough to cover only a fraction of their costs? The "Death Panel" screamers will be out in droves to accuse you of murdering millions of grandmas while the young will accuse you of "forcing" (your word) contributions to a legally sanctioned Ponzi scheme that disadvantages young people who will struggle to feed the kids with everything stacked against them like this, including the need to save for future healthcare costs that used to be covered by Medicare before Schneider sabotaged it.

IMHO the reason why the current Ponzi scheme is likely to survive until it is an irrecoverable disaster can be summed up quite easily:

1) Current politics make it easy to attack any proposal on moral grounds until it becomes a crisis, at which point action is finally justified. In a perfect world, attribution of morality would be the other way around.

2) Electorates want simple solutions, preferably paid for by somebody else, and they will punish any politician silly enough to deviate from this recipe. If you are considering Medicare reform, the Medicare electorate is massive and growing bigger, as are younger predominantly emigrant electorates who may have their own ideas about welfare and access to care.

IMHO this is a recipe for borrowings and teeterings to shore up the Ponzi scheme until it collapses, at which point "brave" politicians will institute draconian reforms far worse than what might be implemented now if not for screams of "Death Board!" and electorates responding to FUD. So it's easier for decisionmakers to treat the $40T deficit as "the elephant in the room" until it gets so big it bursts the room apart. Forget partisan politics: they're all guilty of this one, as is the electorate. We co-operate to inflict own-goals of which bin Laden would have been proud, and we think we're behaving morally.