Medicare Monitor
The Palm Beach Post's veteran Washington correspondent, Larry Lipman, tracks policy makers and interest groups who are shaping the future of the federal health insurance program for the elderly.Medicare Web Resources
Government
•Medicare
•Medicare Frequently Asked Questions
•Medicare Booklet
•Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
•Medicare Payment Advisory Commission
Organizations
•AARP
•America's Health Insurance Plans
•Brookings Institution
•Center for Medicare Advocacy
•Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
•Century Foundation
•Commonwealth Fund
•Families USA
•Florida 50+
•Heritage Foundation
•Kaiser Family Foundation
•Medicare Rights Center
•National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare
•National Academy of Social Insurance
•National Center for Policy Analysis
Blogs
•AARP Issues Blog: Medicare
•Cato Institute Health Care Blog
•Entitled to Know National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare
•The Health Care Blog
Medicare at a glance
Medicare is the federal health care system that covers about 36 million people age 65 and older, plus 7 million disabled. It has four parts:
Financed by a 2.9 percent payroll tax divided equally between employees and employers.
Financed by beneficiary premiums and federal general revenue. Current monthly premiums are $93.50. Starting this year, individuals whose taxable income is more than $80,000 will pay a higher premium.
Financed by Medicare and beneficiary premiums, which vary among plans.
The plans are private and financed by Medicare and beneficiary premiums, which vary among plans.
-- Larry Lipman
RSS feed
What's on this page →
The entry titled "Baucus: Bush's Medicare budget ‘DOA'," and any of the comments about it.
Categories
Commenting is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. M-F
Recent entries
Home > Medicare Monitor > Archives > 2008 > February > 04 > Entry
Baucus: Bush’s Medicare budget ‘DOA’
President Bush’s plan to slash Medicare and Medicaid spending by roughly $600 billion over the next decade received a hostile reception Monday from key members of Congress and elderly advocacy groups.
“This administration ought to know that five years’ worth of Medicare and Medicaid cuts totaling $200 billion are dead on arrival with me and with most of the Congress,” said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont.
Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., chairman of the House Ways and Means’ health subcommittee, which oversees Medicare, said, “This budget again reveals the Republican agenda to starve the Medicare program while protecting the profits of insurance companies. Republicans’ ultimate goal is to privatize Medicare.”
Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., chairman of the House Commerce Committee’s health subcommittee, which oversees Medicaid, called the proposals “cruel cuts that would disproportionately affect seniors, the disabled and low-income children, and therefore should be rejected by Congress.”
Bush’s final budget proposes cutting the growth in Medicare spending by $12.2 billion in the fiscal year that will begin Oct. 1, and $178 billion over five years. He envisions slashing Medicare by $556 billion over 10 years.
Medicaid would be cut by about $18 billion over five years and nearly $47 billion over 10 years.
Most of the Medicare cuts would come from forcing increased competition among health-care providers and by trimming money from teaching hospitals and those that disproportionately care for the poor. The budget envisions a cut of about 10 percent in physician payments but would not trim payments to private Medicare managed-care plans.
Bush noted that for the second year in a row, Medicare’s trustees last year predicted that more than 45 percent of the program’s total budget would come from general tax revenues within the next six years, triggering a requirement that the president propose a plan for bringing the spending level below the threshold. If that threshold is reached, the budget says, Bush would order a 0.4 percent across-the-board reduction in payments to Medicare providers each year the threshold is breached.
David Sloane, AARP’s managing director of government relations, said Bush’s Medicare and Medicaid budget would do little to slow the growth of health-care spending but would “simply be passed along to the American people through higher out-of-pocket costs and potentially fewer services.”
Robert M. Hayes, president of the Medicare Rights Center, said the cuts “would hurt older and disabled Americans and take a wrecking ball to many essential hospitals across the country.”
Barbara Kennelly, of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, called Bush’s plan to slash the Medicare fee-for-service program, but not the private managed-care program, “outrageous and indefensible.”
Comments
By James S. Klich II
February 12, 2008 12:05 AM | Link to this
Medicare and Medicaid need their funding. The elderly and the disabled need this support. We can cut the cost of medications to reduce the cost to the Federal Government. The Federal Government pays to high a cost for drugs as a whole. Drug makers need to sell their drugs at a reduced rate for the good of the United States. In the long run everybody wins and the drug companies will still make money. This would leave more money to pay down our debt or invest in other programs.