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Where does President-elect Donald Trump stand on key health care issues? This snapshot outlines his positions and policy statements during the campaign on issues such as health insurance, the ACA, Medicaid, Medicare, the opioid epidemic, prescription drug costs, and women's reproductive health.
This column was published as a Wall Street Journal Think Tank column on November 21, 2016. Early media coverage of the Republican health-care agenda has concentrated on plans to repeal and then replace the Affordable Care Act.
In this Wall Street Journal Think Tank column Drew Altman discusses how Republicans will assume ownership of health care’s policy and political problems as they assume control, and how that may affect their plans for the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid and Medicare.
As Republican policymakers consider how to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA), they are likely to face a number of decisions about whether to retain any of the law’s changes to Medicare. Repealing the ACA has potential implications for Medicare spending, beneficiaries, and other stakeholders, according to a new Kaiser Family Foundation brief.
Changes in Medicare’s private contracting laws could have significant implications for beneficiaries, doctors, and the Medicare program. This brief summarizes the three options that physicians and practitioners currently have for charging Medicare patients, explains how private contracting works in Medicare under current law, and reviews current proposals on changes to private contracting in Medicare, as well as their implications for patients, physicians, and the Medicare program.
Under current law, physicians may choose to privately contract with their Medicare patients, though very few do.
Medicare, the nation’s federal health insurance program for 57 million people age 65 and over and younger people with disabilities, often plays a major role in federal health policy and budget discussions. Medicare is likely to be back on the federal policy agenda as Congress debates repealing and replacing the ACA, and also if policymakers turn their attention to reducing entitlement spending as part of efforts to reduce the growing federal budget deficit and debt. This issue brief presents 10 facts and figures about Medicare’s financial status today and the outlook for the future.
In this Washington Post op-ed, Drew Altman discusses how Republicans' ideas to change Medicaid and Medicare and repeal the Affordable Care Act would fundamentally change the federal role in health, calling it: the biggest change in health we are NOT debating.
In a Health Affairs blog post, Tricia Neuman and Gretchen Jacobson of the Kaiser Family Foundation examine how proposals to convert Medicare to a premium support system could lead to higher Medicare premiums and cost-sharing for seniors currently enrolled in the program, even if today’s seniors are “grandfathered” and the new system is phased-in for people ages 55 and younger. The blog post explains how today’s seniors could face higher health care costs, if older beneficiaries are separated, at least actuarially, from younger ones. Lawmakers could implement policies to prevent cost increases for seniors, but doing so would reduce Medicare savings, a key objective of many premium support proposals.
In all but four states, insurance companies can deny private Medigap insurance policies to seniors after their initial enrollment in Medicare because of a pre-existing medical condition, such as diabetes or heart disease, except under limited, qualifying circumstances, a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis finds.
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