Study Series on Medicare Solvency

This project will engage select Medicare experts to generate Fund blog posts discussing how they would address the impending insolvency of the Medicare trust fund. These blog posts will include subtopics, including: Medicare Advantage; prescription drugs; Medigap; accountable care organizations and new delivery system reform initiatives; provider payments; beneficiary premiums, cost-sharing, and benefits; and revenues. Ten leading experts, with diverse political perspectives and areas of focus within Medicare, will write the posts, with a consulting agreement of $2,000 paid for through this authorization for those experts without an existing grant/contract with the Fund. We expect that each author will cover a number of different policies in the above subtopics to address the magnitude of the budget situation. We will provide the authors with a general format for the blogs so that they can be presented together as a part of a series, are comparable, and individual policies can be easily identified. Policies may include previously scored, more established proposals, as well as newly developed, unscored options. The resulting posts will be published on the Fund website. In addition, individual policy options will be organized by subtopic, with author attribution, for easy reference of policy solutions that address a particular aspect of the Medicare program.