CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation have lowered their estimates of the net federal cost of the ACA’s insurance coverage provisions. As reflected in CBO’s April 2014 baseline, the agencies now project a cost of $36 billion for 2014, $5 billion less than the projection made...

Spending for Medicare's prescription drug program (Part D) was $50 billion in 2013—about 50 percent less than CBO projected when the program was created. Lower growth rates in national drug spending and lower-than-expected enrollment primarily account for the difference. The competitive design...

Observers often cite fraud as an important contributor to high health care spending, particularly in federal programs. This report describes how CBO estimates the budgetary effects of legislative proposals to reduce fraud in Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program...

Testimony by Matthew Goldberg, Deputy Assistant Director of CBO’s National Security Division, before the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs’s Subcommittee on Health, U.S. House of Representatives.

Legislation enacted in 2014 calls for the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) to expand the availability of health care to eligible veterans. The structure of VHA and published studies suggest that VHA care has been less expensive than care provided by the private sector. However, limited...

Most beneficiaries of Medicare's Part D prescription drug insurance choose among private drug plans to receive their coverage. This paper is the first to examine the relationship between the number of competing plan sponsors and the cost of Part D during the program's first five years. Over the...

By Andrew Stocking (CBO), James Baumgardner (CBO), Melinda Buntin (Vanderbilt University), and Anna Cook (CBO) The structure of the Medicare Part D prescription drug program generally encourages plan sponsors to submit low bids. However, rules in the program relating to low-income beneficiaries...

Under current law, the deficit will decrease to $492 billion in 2014, CBO projects, as revenues continue rebounding from their low in the recession. But beginning in 2016, deficits will rise again—largely because of an aging population, rising health care costs, an expansion of federal...

The President's proposals would, relative to CBO's current-law baseline, boost deficits from 2014 through 2016 but reduce them from 2017 through 2024, CBO and JCT estimate. Deficits would total $6.6 trillion between 2015 and 2024, $1.0 trillion less than the cumulative deficit in CBO's baseline....

Although federal deficits have shrunk markedly in recent years, growing spending for Social Security and major health care programs, along with increasing interest costs, would cause them to rise steadily over the long term. The larger deficits would cause federal debt to grow faster than the...