The following article by Austin Frakt was posted on the New York TImes website October 30, 2017:
Last month, as Republican leaders were preoccupied with another unsuccessful attempt to replace Obamacare, a senior Trump administration official issued a warning about a different major medical program, Medicare.
The official, Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Medicare was facing a fiscal crisis. She announced that she was asking the agency’s innovation center for ideas to address it, and that part of the answer was to give consumers “incentives to be cost-conscious.” This has some Democrats worried that she’s trying to move Medicare toward something called premium support, which would be a huge change for consumers.
Before we get into the pros and cons, what’s the fiscal crisis? According to projections from this year’s Medicare Trustees’ report, the fund that pays for Medicare-financed hospital care will be depleted in 12 years, and care for other services will consume an ever-larger share of the economy and federal revenue. Citing trends like those, Republicans included the outlines of a Medicare premium support plan in the House of Representatives’ fiscal year 2018 budget resolution, as they did in several prior ones. Continue reading “How a Republican Idea for Reducing Medicare Costs Could Affect You”