#Medicare

Officials in Maryland and Massachusetts are pursuing ambitious reforms to limit health spending to their states’ economic growth rates. These reforms could provide useful lessons for the rest of the country.In Maryland, state hospitals and insurers have agreed to enter…

The President signed a measure yesterday that postpones sharp cuts in Medicare payments to health care providers for another year. This represented an unfortunate end, for now, to the bipartisan effort to find a permanent replacement for Medicare’s Sustainable Growth…

The House has passed a bill to reform Medicare payments to providers but doomed the legislation by attaching a 5-year delay in the Affordable Health Care’s individual mandate. A dozen Democrats joined the Republican majority in approving the bill Friday…

The latest Financial Report of the U.S. Government shows that despite recent lower deficits, long-term fiscal policy remains on an unsustainable course.The annual report, released by the Department of the Treasury, says that despite cuts to discretionary spending and increased…

As we await the full release of the President’s Fiscal Year 2015 Budget, some important specifics have been slowly made public. It looks like this budget, as is usually the case, will contain a mixture of sensible reforms and politically…

Since 2003 Congress has enacted temporary “patches” to prevent cuts in Medicare’s physician reimbursements. This is necessary because of the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) -- a flawed formula for spending on physician services that requires unrealistically large cuts.In April, a…

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) now estimates that gradually increasing the eligibility age for Medicare to 67 would reduce deficits by $19 billion through 2023, significantly less than the $113 billion CBO estimated in January 2012.The new estimate is based…

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently released a report examining the viability of two “premium support” alternatives to the fee-for-service structure in Medicare.Both alternatives would have the federal government pay subsidies to insurance companies offering plans providing the same benefit…