Deficit Reduction

With its inclusion in the House GOP health plan released last month, the idea of converting Medicare into a premium support system once again features prominently in Capitol Hill policy discussions about the future of Medicare, the federal health insurance program that covers 57 million seniors and people with disabilities.…

Premium support is a general term used to describe an approach to reform Medicare that aims to reduce the growth in Medicare spending. These FAQs raise and discuss basic questions about the possible effects of a premium support system for Medicare beneficiaries, the federal budget, health care providers, and private health plans.

Among Medicare Changes, Strongest and Broadest Support Is for Negotiating Drug Prices People With Medicare, Medicaid and Employer Plans Give Their Coverage Similar Ratings, But Some Report Affordability and Physician Access Problems Fifty years after President Lyndon Johnson signed the law creating the Medicare and Medicaid programs, a new Kaiser…

Medicare and Medicaid were signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on July 30, 1965 in a bipartisan effort to provide health insurance coverage for low-income, disabled, and elderly Americans. In their 50 year history, each of these programs has come to play a key role in providing health coverage to millions of Americans today and make up a significant component of federal and state budgets. As major programs both in size and scope, their role and the ways in which they operate are often debated by policymakers and the public alike. As the programs reach their 50th year, the Kaiser Family Foundation conducted a nationally representative survey of Americans to explore the public’s views of these programs, their experiences as beneficiaries, and their opinions on proposals for future changes.

On February 2, 2015, the Office of Management and Budget released President Obama’s budget for fiscal year (FY) 2016, which includes provisions related to federal spending and revenues, including Medicare savings. The President’s FY2016 budget proposal would reduce net Medicare spending by $423 billion between 2016 and 2025, and is estimated to extend the solvency of the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund by approximately five years. This brief summarizes the Medicare provisions included in the President’s FY2016 Budget.

Introduction Health spending has been growing at historically low levels in recent years. The Office of the Actuary (OACT) in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reports that national health spending grew by 3.9% each year from 2009 to 2011, the lowest rate of growth since the federal government began keeping…

Drew Altman, President and CEO of the Foundation, and Larry Levitt, Senior Vice President, co-authored a Washington Post op-ed that examined how the economy affects the nation’s health spending.  It concludes that the record slow growth rate of recent years stems largely from economic factors beyond the health system, with the…

In this article in the Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, researchers from the Kaiser Family Foundation examine how health issues that women face over the course of their lives, as well as policies that shape Medicare, Medicaid and other supplemental coverage, can affect retired women’s economic well-being. They found that…

This study evaluated the changes in Medicare beneficiaries’ health care spending between 1997 and 2003, and found beneficiaries spent a growing share of their income on health care. The results showed that median out-of-pocket health spending increased from 11.9% of income in 1997 to 15.5% in 2003, and about four…

This report projects the impact of the new Medicare drug benefit on out-of-pocket spending for people who enroll in 2006. This analysis from November 2004 estimates that 6.9 million beneficiaries are projected to be affected by the coverage gap (the so-called “doughnut hole”) in the standard Part D drug benefit.…