President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday nominated 2024 Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
Read MoreTrump Taps Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for HHS Secretary
Tag: Medicare
New Biden-Harris Medicare Pan Could Cost Taxpayers $20 Billion in Election-Year Giveaway, CBO Warns
In an election-year stunner, the Congressional Budget Office is warning the Biden-Harris administration’s new Medicare prescription drug plan could cost taxpayers more than $20 billion over three years.
The budget analysis arm of Congress said the increased costs are due to the government subsidizing many seniors’ premiums by sending money to insurance firms, and it would cost at least $5 billion extra in 2025 alone and add to the deficit.
Read MoreBiden-Harris Admin on Track to Oversee Massive $1 Trillion in Improper Payments, Watchdog Group Finds
If current trends persist, the Biden-Harris administration will have made over $1 trillion in improper payments by the time President Joe Biden leaves office, according to a report released by the watchdog organization Open The Books on Thursday.
An improper payment is a disbursement “made by the government to the wrong person, in the wrong amount or for the wrong reason,” per federal guidelines. The Biden-Harris administration, between 2021 and 2023, oversaw $801.4 billion in such payments after adjusting for inflation, according to the report.
Read MoreDem Senator Bob Menendez Resigns Following Bribery Conviction
Democratic New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez resigned his seat in the Senate on Tuesday, according to multiple outlets.
Read MoreAnalysis: Federal Fiscal Burden Consumes 93 Percent of America’s Wealth
Based on data from a U.S. Treasury report, the federal government has amassed $142 trillion in debts, liabilities, and unfunded obligations. This staggering figure equals 93% of all the wealth Americans have accumulated since the nation’s founding, estimated by the Federal Reserve to be $152 trillion.
Unlike other measures of federal red ink that cover an arbitrary period, extend into the infinite future, or ignore government resources, the figure of $142 trillion applies strictly to Americans who are alive right now and includes the government’s commercial assets. Thus, it quantifies the financial burden that today’s Americans are leaving to their children and future generations.
Read MoreCommentary: The Federal Government Loses More Money than Could Ever Be Accounted For
Not long after Jeremy Gober started running a sleep center, he quit treating patients for narcolepsy and sleep apnea and went full-time submitting bogus insurance claims. According to Gober’s 2022 indictment, he committed at least one especially sloppy error: One of his make-believe billings included a Medicare claim for treatment in March 2018 for a patient who’d died in December 2017. Before Gober was caught, Medicare and California’s healthcare system, Medi-Cal, ended up paying him a total of $587,000 for claims that turned out to be fiction.
The payments to Gober were part of $260 million the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spent from 2009 through 2019 to reimburse healthcare providers in 15 states and Puerto Rico for services to patients who were dead, according to the inspector general of the HHS, which administers Medicare and Medicaid — programs with combined expenditures of $1.7 trillion.
Read MoreCommentary: Rural and Hispanic Communities Among Those Most Benefited by Telehealth
Telehealth has become a health care gamechanger for tens of millions of Americans.
We all know the time and effort an in-person health visit takes – travel to the appointment, time off work, hours spent in an office, follow ups that require us to do the whole process over again. But telehealth expansion in the post-COVID world has changed everything.
Read MoreU.S. Spending on Interest Tops National Defense, Medicare
Congress has spent more money on interest so far this year than it has spent on both national defense and Medicare.
Read MoreCombined Social Security Trust Fund Projected to Deplete Reserves by 2035
Two reports released Monday show that the U.S. combined Social Security trust fund is projected to deplete its reserves by 2035.
The Trustees for Social Security and Medicare released annual reports on Monday. The Trustees projected the Medicare Hospital Insurance trust fund will exhaust its reserves in 2036. The Social Security Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) trust fund was projected to be insolvent by 2033.
Read MoreWatchdog: Biden’s 2025 Budget Would Drive National Debt to $45 Trillion in 10 Years, 106 Percent of GDP
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) a budget watchdog group, found that President Joe Biden’s fiscal year 2025 budget would drive the national debt to $45.1 trillion or 106 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2034, from $27.4 trillion or about 97 percent of GDP at the present time.
The organization noted that those calculations are based on the Biden administration’s own internal figures. The current $27.4 trillion debt figure is the debt held by the public, not the total national debt including intragovernmental holdings.
Read More