Medicaid

It’s coming… in June, Congress will decide whether to increase Medicare premiums yet again to cover the cost of paying doctors more. Jacking up Medicare premiums on seniors because Congress has repeatedly failed to fix a flawed system just doesn’t sound very fair.

Mark Duggan and Fiona Scott Morton published a paper at NBER with this general conclusion:

With a greying population, Medicare costs are anticipated to rise drastically over the coming decades, and with each passing day, each one of us approaches the day where, God willing, we would be covered under a Medicare Program, either upon reaching the age of sixty fi

One of the most daunting things about the long-term federal budget problem is that the programs that are in the most trouble -- Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security -- are also running on autopilot. Unlike the rest of the budget, Congress doesn't vote on these programs every year. They're driven by formulas, not by conscious decisions by policymakers.