A Huge Threat to the U.S. Budget Has Receded. And No One Is Sure Why.

A Huge Threat to the U.S. Budget Has Receded. And No One Is Sure Why. (Published 2023)

Instead of growing and growing, as it always had, spending per Medicare beneficiary has nearly leveled off over more than a decade.

www.nytimes.com

For decades, runaway Medicare spending was the story of the federal budget. Now, flat Medicare spending might be a bigger one.

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The reason for the per-person slowdown is a bit of a mystery. Scholars have been arguing about it for years, but no one seems sure enough to confidently predict whether it is likely to stick around for much longer.

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Some of the reductions are easy to explain. Congress changed Medicare policy. The biggest such shift came with the Affordable Care Act in 2010, which reduced Medicare’s payments to hospitals and to health insurers that offered private Medicare Advantage plans. Congress also cut Medicare payments as part of a budget deal in 2011.

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But most of the savings can’t be attributed to any obvious policy shift. In a recent letter to the Senate Budget Committee, economists at the Congressional Budget Office described the huge reductions in its Medicare forecasts between 2010 and 2020. Most of those reductions came from a category the budget office calls “technical adjustments,” which it uses to describe changes to public health and the practice of medicine itself.

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Pommer said:

All those seniors who died of the Coronavirus depressed the curve?

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Pommer said:

Oh!? Like when ObamaCare the PPACA took effect?
What a coincidence!

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