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....
off the charts
POLICY INSIGHT
BEYOND THE NUMBERS
BEYOND THE NUMBERS
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...
Moving Forward With Medicare’s IPAB
June 24, 2016
Two events this week drew new attention to the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) — a presidentially appointed commission charged with developing ways to slow the growth of Medicare spending. Medicare’s trustees reported that projected Medicare...
Previewing the 2016 Social Security and Medicare Trustees’ Reports
June 20, 2016
The Social Security and Medicare trustees will release their annual reports on the programs’ finances Wednesday. Though we don’t know how the projections may change from last year’s, we expect that they will tell a similar story: that...
Medicare Drug Payment Demonstration Should Move Forward
May 5, 2016
Medicare’s proposed demonstration project to test new ways to pay for drugs covered by Part B has generated considerable controversy. A largely Republican...
Let’s Try Out New Ways to Pay for Medicare Part B Drugs
April 1, 2016
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is proposing a nationwide five-year demonstration project to test new ways to pay for drugs covered by Medicare Part B. The goal is to reduce costs to Medicare and its beneficiaries while maintaining or...
