Recent statements by President Trump and an ongoing lawsuit have left health insurers uncertain whether they will continue to receive billions of dollars they’re owed in cost-sharing reduction payments. Congress could resolve this uncertainty by clarifying the law and providing an...
off the charts
POLICY INSIGHT
BEYOND THE NUMBERS
BEYOND THE NUMBERS
House Republican Health Plan Would Increase Premiums
March 24, 2017
Speaker Paul Ryan says the House Republican health bill would lower premiums by 10 percent, but that’s highly misleading. It doesn’t mean that the price of your insurance plan would be lower, as Ryan implies. In fact, people who wanted to keep the insurance plan that they have would face premium...
House GOP Health Plan Would Accelerate Depletion of Medicare Trust Fund by Four Years
March 20, 2017
The House bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would move up the Medicare’s Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund’s depletion from 2028 to 2024 (see graph). Repealing a payroll tax on high earners would advance the depletion date by three years, as we previously...
House Republican Health Plan Would Weaken Medicare
March 14, 2017
The House bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) wouldn’t just cause 24 million people to become uninsured, as the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reports; it also would weaken Medicare by repealing a payroll tax on high earners that supports Medicare’s Hospital Insurance...
Projected Health Spending Falling — Even with ACA’s Coverage Expansions
February 13, 2017
In its latest projections, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) continues to estimate that federal health spending — including the costs of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which has enabled 20 million Americans to get coverage — will be less than what it had projected in 2010 without the ACA....
Trump Move Harms Retirement Savers, Helps Wall Street
February 8, 2017
President Trump has directed the Labor Department to review an Obama Administration rule requiring financial advisers to put their clients’ interests first. The directive will likely delay, and possibly derail, this...
Keep the Increase in Medical Expense Deduction Threshold
September 12, 2016
Repealing the increase in the threshold for deducting medical expenses, as a pending House bill would do, would give a costly, unnecessary tax break to high-income taxpayers.
Taxpayers may claim an itemized income tax deduction for extraordinary medical expenses that exceed a certain threshold. Health reform increased the...
House Republican Health Plan Would Radically Restructure Medicare
July 26, 2016
The health plan from House Republican leaders would raise costs for many or most Medicare beneficiaries by converting Medicare to a premium support system, raising its eligibility age, and...
Medicare Leads in Controlling Health Costs
July 21, 2016
Medicare has been the leader in reforming the health care payment system to improve efficiency and has outperformed private health insurance in holding down the growth of health costs, as we note in our newly updated report on Medicare’s finances. Since 1987, Medicare spending per enrollee has grown by 5.7 percent a...
