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KFF designs, conducts and analyzes original public opinion and survey research on Americans’ attitudes, knowledge, and experiences with the health care system to help amplify the public’s voice in major national debates.
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This policy insight examines the unexpected drop in Medicare's per-beneficiary spending projections and its implications for beneficiaries and the program's future.
Written and produced by KFF staff, The Story of Medicare: A Timeline serves as a visual timeline of Medicare’s history, including the debate that led to its creation in 1965 and subsequent changes, such as the passage and repeal of the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act in the 1980s, the Medicare Modernization Act in 2003, and the Affordable Care Act.
The October KFF Health Tracking Poll explores experiences with unpaid caregiving, and favorability of expansion of home and community based services (HCBS). It also examines experiences with difficulty affording and putting of health care services among seniors, favorability of the ACA and experience with determining eligibility for lower cost insurance as part of the COVID relief package.
As part of broad deficit-reduction plans, policymakers are considering reforms to the nation's three major entitlement programs - Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security - that could significantly affect the economic security of seniors in their retirement years.
Several deficit-reduction plans have proposed combining Medicare's separate deductibles for hospital and physician services, standardizing cost sharing across types of benefits, and establishing a new limit on annual out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries.
This brief provides a side-by-side comparison of Medicare provisions included in broad-based packages to reduce the deficit and debt put forward by the President and the Chairmen of the House and Senate Budget Committees. In addition, this brief summarizes Medicare provisions included in other deficit- and debt- reduction proposals released since January 2012 and describes recent activities that pertain to Medicare and the federal budget, including Medicare’s role in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the fiscal cliff and sequestration.
If enacted into law in its current form, and Congress takes no further action, [the House reconciliation bill's] increase in the deficit would trigger mandatory cuts, also known as sequestration, under the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010.
While the Census Bureau’s official poverty measure shows 9 percent of seniors nationally live in poverty, the share climbs to about one in seven seniors (15 percent) under the Bureau’s alternative Supplemental Poverty Measure, which takes into account out-of-pocket health expenses and geographic differences in the cost of living. Produced by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Old and Poor: America's Forgotten provides a portrait of seniors who are living in poverty, in both urban and rural areas across the United States.
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.
This Issue Brief describes the Medicare Hospital Readmission Reduction Program (HRRP), which penalizes hospitals that have relatively higher readmission rates, analyzes the impact of this program on Medicare patients and hospitals, and discusses several issues that have been raised regarding its implementation.
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