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Greece owes $320 billion to its creditors and cannot repay the loans. Like Greece, Medicare is also accumulating an unaffordable mountain of debt. And both Greece and Medicare are more likely to default on their debts than to adopt the highly unpopular reforms needed to pay them off. Wednesday's news from the Medicare Trustees may not seem that dire. The headline is comforting, but misleading. Medicare's Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund-also known as Part A-will run short of money, but not until 2030. Starting that year, Part A benefits can be paid out only to the extent that money comes...

The Social Security Administration's latest annual report says what it has been saying for several years now — its disability insurance program will become insolvent in 2016.

They are supposed to be doctor's offices, clinics or hospitals, not hamburger stands, vacant lots and mailbox shops, but that's what some of the 23,400 potentially fake or bad addresses on Medicare's list of health care providers are, according to a report released today to Congress from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). The report says that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency that administers Medicare, estimates that last year some $60 billion of American taxpayer money, or more than 10 percent of Medicare’s total budget, was lost to fraud, waste, abuse and improper payments....

Krugman is for a single-payer health care system and argues that socialist health care systems provide better health outcomes at cheaper cost around the world. My response was that third-party payer systems in education and health care are what's driving up costs and that health care premiums paid by families are rising way faster than Obama predicted. Where are the $2,500 in family savings? Medicare is apparently the glittering success story of government, yet it's running unfunded liabilities in the tens of trillions of dollars. Krugman was lamest in explaining the migration of a thousand people a day from blue...

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), along with about 70 other House Democrats, introduced a bill in Congress on Wednesday that would provide taxpayer-funded abortion coverage to all women who are covered by an insurance plan through the federal government—including federal workers, military members, women incarcerated in federal prisons, and low-income women covered by Medicaid. The Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Coverage Act, or EACH Woman Act, states that “The Federal Government shall (1) ensure coverage for abortion care in public health insurance programs, including Medicaid, Medicare and the Children’s Health Insurance Program” and “in its role as an employer...

Medicare Plans to Pay Doctors for Counseling on End of Life By PAM BELLUCKJULY 8, 2015 Medicare, the federal program that insures 55 million older and disabled Americans, announced plans on Wednesday to reimburse doctors for conversations with patients about whether and how they would want to be kept alive if they became too sick to speak for themselves. The proposal would settle a debate that raged before the passage of the Affordable Care Act, when Sarah Palin labeled a similar plan as tantamount to setting up “death panels” that could cut off care for the sick. The new plan...

Medicare said Wednesday it plans to pay doctors to counsel patients about end-of-life care, the same idea that sparked accusations of “death panels” and fanned a political furor around President Barack Obama’s health care law six years ago. The policy change, to take effect Jan. 1, was tucked into a massive regulation on payments for doctors. It suggests that what many doctors regard as a common-sense option is no longer seen by the Obama administration as politically toxic. Counseling would be entirely voluntary for patients. Some doctors already have such conversations with their patients without billing extra. Certain private insurers...

What? The Supreme Court’s recent blessing of Obamacare has precipitated a rush among the nation’s biggest health insurers to consolidate into two or three behemoths. The result will be good for their shareholders and executives, but bad for the rest of us – who will pay through the nose for the health insurance we need. .... Insurers are seeking rate hikes of 20 to 40 percent for next year because they think they already have enough economic and political clout to get them. ... The alternative is a government-run single payer system – such as is in place in almost...

Despite the Supreme Court’s repeated attempts to prop it up, Obamacare is collapsing. This is obvious not merely to the majority of Americans who have always disapproved of the law, but also to an increasing number of progressives. Consequently, we are once again hearing calls for single-payer health care. Most advocates of this system, including Hillary Clinton’s main competitor for the 2016 Democrat presidential nomination, favor Medicare-for-All. They want, in other words, to put all Americans on the government program that covers the elderly and disabled. An excellent antidote for this simplistic solution is David Hogberg’s new book, Medicare’s Victims:...

A recent draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal would give U.S. pharmaceutical firms unprecedented protections against competition from cheaper generic drugs, possibly transcending the patent protections in U.S. law. POLITICO has obtained a draft copy of TPP’s intellectual property chapter as it stood on May 11, at the start of the latest negotiating round in Guam. While U.S. trade officials would not confirm the authenticity of the document, they downplayed its importance, emphasizing that the terms of the deal are likely to change significantly as the talks enter their final stages. Those terms are still secret, but the public...

Days spent in the hospital as an outpatient, rather than being officially admitted, can leave Medicare patients with bigger bills. It's bad enough spending three or more days in a hospital -- undergoing a barrage of medical tests and procedures. Brace yourself for even more pain at discharge if the hospital tells you that you were actually never admitted but were on Medicare "observation status." That designation could cost you big time. Hospitalized Medicare beneficiaries who are under observation are considered outpatients, even if they spend many days in the hospital. If you find yourself in this boat, there's a...

Anyone who thinks ObamaCare will cut the deficit over the next decade should look at Page 11 of the latest Congressional Budget Office report. The table on that page shows how the trillions in ObamaCare subsidies are supposed to be "paid for" — by tax hikes or spending cuts. What it reveals, however, is that ObamaCare increasingly relies on dubious Medicare spending cuts to cover its growing subsidy costs.

Republicans will risk political pushback to put entitlement programs on the agenda during the presidential election. Some changes are in the wind for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—entitlement programs that account for 45% of the federal government’s payouts. Many of the changes are still years away. But some of them will start next year, smack in the middle of the presidential election campaign, forcing candidates to address issues that they and their advisers generally try to steer clear of when they’re running. Kicking off the rare election-year debate: a move to rescue the Social Security disability fund image: http://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/icon1.png before...

John Kasich is a highly popular governor of a vital swing state, possessed of national experience and long-standing ties to his party’s financial and ideological elite. He is launching a presidential campaign that stands virtually no chance of success, if you define “success” to mean acquiring the nomination. It looks increasingly likely, however, that Kasich defines success as something else altogether. Kasich began his career in a dissident role. As the Republican Party careened in the 1980s and 1990s toward militant supply-side economics, Kasich carved out an identity as an old-fashioned deficit hawk. Kasich was evangelical on the subject of...

Proposals set the stage for debate over federal health law’s impact. Major insurers in some states are proposing hefty rate boosts for plans sold under the federal health law, setting the stage for an intense debate this summer over the law’s impact. In New Mexico, market leader Health Care Service Corp. is asking for an average jump of 51.6% in premiums for 2016. The biggest insurer in Tennessee, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, has requested an average 36.3% increase. In Maryland, market leader CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield wants to raise rates 30.4% across its products. Moda Health, the largest insurer on the...

When the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015, commonly known as the "doc-fix" legislation, becomes law, some Medicare participants will pay 30% more for their Part B premiums. The legislation, which was decisively passed by the House on March 26 and the Senate on April 14 is expected to be signed by President Obama soon. The bill replaces the current physician Medicare reimbursement schedule with payment increases for doctors for the next five years. It will be financed by higher Medicare Part B premiums for individuals whose income exceeds specified thresholds beginning in 2018.

Over 500 organizations are calling on Congress to repeal a Medicare cost-cutting board that is part of ObamaCare. The panel at issue is called the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), and is charged with coming up with ways to cut Medicare spending. Legislation to repeal the board sponsored by Reps. Phil Roe (R-Tenn.) and Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) has 222 co-sponsors, including 19 Democrats. While some opponents of ObamaCare have called the IPAB a “death panel,” the board is banned by law from recommending changes that would ration care or require seniors to pay a higher share of costs. Its reforms...

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said Sunday that his opposition to reforming Social Security doesn’t make him sound like a Democrat — but like an American. The former Arkansas governor has broken with his party and his rivals for the nomination by opposing GOP proposals to cut benefits or raise the retirement age for Social Seucurity and transform Medicare into a voucher-style program, measures aimed at preventing the popular programs from going broke. Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/may/10/mike-huckabee-americans-dont-want-social-security-/#ixzz3ZlVVjFNC Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter

New York real estate mogul Donald Trump said Thursday that former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) could not prevent funding cuts to entitlement programs if elected president in 2016. “Huckabee is a nice guy but will never be able to bring in the funds so as not to cut Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid,” Trump tweeted. “I will.” Trump, a possible 2016 GOP presidential candidate, also argued Huckabee was stealing his potential campaign ideas. “Huckabee copied me,” Trump wrote. “I was the first & only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare &...

a new poll shows that Republican voters who rally to that cry still want to maintain many federal programs. The results, from an online poll of 4,770 adults from April 10 to 24, highlight a dilemma for Republican candidates such as Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas who have made reducing the size of government a top campaign theme.