{"id":264626,"date":"2010-02-02T08:47:16","date_gmt":"2010-02-02T13:47:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/health\/2010\/02\/02\/reminder-medicare-medicaid-are-gobbling-up-the-budget\/"},"modified":"2010-02-02T08:47:16","modified_gmt":"2010-02-02T13:47:16","slug":"reminder-medicare-medicaid-are-gobbling-up-the-budget","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/264626","title":{"rendered":"Reminder: Medicare, Medicaid Are Gobbling Up the Budget"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Stethoscope\"President Obama’s budget is still in the news<\/a> this morning, and there’s plenty of interesting health stuff<\/a> in there. But it’s worth pausing to note that the big drivers are mandatory spending on Medicare and Medicaid<\/a> — huge, rapidly growing costs that are outside the purview of Obama’s (or any president’s) annual recommendations for discretionary spending.<\/p>\n

Take a look at the table on pages 5-7 of this PDF<\/a>, which explains Obama’s proposed funding of the Department of Health and Human Services.<\/p>\n

Total discretionary outlays (funding for CDC, NIH, that sort of thing) are $82.8 billion. Sure, that’s a lot of money. But mandatory outlays for Medicare under existing law are $489.3 billion; the figure for Medicaid is $264.5 billion.<\/p>\n

Under current law, spending on Medicare and Medicaid is set to rise by $58 billion between 2010 and 2011. Throw in the extra $25.3 billion in Medicaid funding<\/a> proposed by the president, and just the year-over-year growth for Medicare and Medicaid is comparable to all of the HHS discretionary spending combined.<\/p>\n

Photo: iStockphoto<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/img><\/a>
\n<\/img><\/a><\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President Obama’s budget is still in the news this morning, and there’s plenty of interesting health stuff in there. But it’s worth pausing to note that the big drivers are mandatory spending on Medicare and Medicaid — huge, rapidly growing costs that are outside the purview of Obama’s (or any president’s) annual recommendations for discretionary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":650,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/650"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264626\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}