Every year the Congressional Budget Office publishes a menu of options for reducing federal spending and the federal budget deficit.  As in the past, this year’s compendium includes a number of options to reduce federal health care spending and raises federal revenue through health care initiatives.

The cost-cutting options include:

• establish caps on federal spending for Medicaid
• limit states’ taxes on health care providers
• reduce federal Medicaid matching rates
• change the cost-sharing rules for Medicare and restrict Medigap insurance
• raise the age of eligibility for Medicare to 67
• reduce Medicare’s coverage of bad debt
• consolidate and reduce federal payments for graduate medical education at teaching hospitals
• use an alternative measure of inflation to index social security and other mandatory programs

Options to raise additional revenue include:

• increase premiums for Parts B and D of Medicare
• reduce tax subsidies for employment-based health insurance
• increase the payroll tax rate for Medicare hospital insurance

Many of these proposals, if implemented, would be damaging for private safety-net hospitals.

Learn more about the CBO’s recommendations, how they might be implemented, and their potential implications in the CBO report Options for Reducing the Deficit: 2019 to 2028.