The runaway federal spending that has accompanied the coronavirus pandemic will force a reckoning in the “mandatory” portion of the U.S. government’s budget after the pandemic has passed. That’s the assessment of AEI resident fellow James Capretta, who indicates that the reckoning will mean big changes for mandatory entitlement programs whose spending has been...
Read More »

“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Perhaps, there is a third thing: government waste.

Medicare’s Hospital Insurance Trust Fund is set to run out of money by 2026.

Governor Gavin Newsom wants to expand Medi-Cal, the state’s program for low-income people, to every Californian under age 26, regardless of immigration status.

What government doesn’t know about health care can keep you from getting the care you need when you need it.

Medicare coverage based on lifetime income rather than current.

Merritt Hawkins, a physician-staffing firm, has published its periodic survey of waiting times for appointments with physicians in 30 metropolitan markets. The results: Average new patient physician appointment wait times have increased significantly. The average wait time for a physician appointment for the 15 large metro markets surveyed is 24.1 days, up 30% from...
Read More »

Before the Affordable Care Act passed in March 2010, President Obama repeatedly promised that the typical family’s health premiums would go down by $2,500 after implementing the expansion of health insurance we label Obamacare. Nothing of the sort has happened, of course. For the past few years, prices and spending have appeared moderate by...
Read More »

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has published its biennial update of federal programs “that it identifies as high risk due to their greater vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement...” Healthcare programs feature high on the list. Medicare, the entitlement program for seniors, and Medicaid, the joint state-federal welfare program for low-income households, are...
Read More »

In April 2015, huge bipartisan majorities passed a milestone Medicare reform bill called MACRA (Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act), which imported all the worst elements of Obamacare into Medicare. At the time, I wrote a series of posts (culminating in this one), which anticipated that physicians would refuse to swallow the medicine MACRA...
Read More »