December 19, 2018: We have corrected the list of preventive services for which the ACA eliminated cost-sharing.
If allowed to stand, a U.S. District Court judge’s decision striking down the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would significantly affect Medicare. To be sure, since the legal reasoning behind the decision is...
The House may vote on a year-end tax bill that, among other provisions, would delay or repeal four health-related taxes: the 2.3 percent excise tax on medical devices, the fee on health insurance providers (the “health insurance tax”), the excise tax on high-cost health insurance plans (...
Private Medicare Advantage (MA) insurers have long received overpayments from Medicare due to their “upcoding,” which makes MA enrollees appear less healthy than they are — and a recent court decision could worsen the problem. As policymakers look to strengthen Medicare, eliminating upcoding should be high on their...
Proposals to expand Medicare have moved to the forefront of debate, with several expansion plans advanced in policy journals or introduced in Congress. Although they vary in scope, all raise numerous technical and program design issues. In a new issue brief for the National Academy of...
Beneficiaries in Medicare’s prescription drug program (Medicare Part D) with high drug spending will have to pay much more out of pocket starting in 2020 under a scheduled sharp increase in the spending threshold at which catastrophic coverage kicks in. Policymakers may soon eliminate that looming benefit “cliff.” But they shouldn’t also reduce the discount that drug companies must pay when...
The House Ways and Means Committee will mark up a bill today to delay the excise tax on high-cost health plans (the so-called “Cadillac tax”) by another year, to 2023. That would be unwise for two reasons: it would lose needed revenue, and it would set back efforts to slow the growth of health care costs.
The...
The Social Security and Medicare trustees will release their annual reports on the programs’ finances tomorrow and, though we don’t know how the projections may change from last year’s, we expect them to tell a similar story: ...
New Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections show that the budget outlook has deteriorated significantly, but that doesn’t justify unwise spending cuts or an economically damaging balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
CBO now projects that the deficit will top $1 trillion...
The problems with a constitutional balanced budget amendment, which the House will vote on this week, go far beyond the significant economic harm it could cause. For instance, its requirement that policymakers offset federal spending in any year with revenues collected in...
Some congressional Republicans want to force votes to cut (or “rescind”) billions of dollars in non-defense spending from the 2018 government funding bill Congress passed on a bipartisan basis last month, according to press reports. Doing so would renege on the recent bipartisan budget...
