Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

The most recent Medicare trustees' report calls for comprehensive reform to address the program's long-term financing issues, according to the American Academy of Actuaries. Medicare's hospital insurance expenditures exceed income from payroll taxes, and Medicare must also rely on interest accrued on trust-fund assets, the program's trustees say.

Beginning in 2010, these expenditures will exceed income including interest, and Medicare will draw on its hospital insurance trust-fund assets. The trust fund is projected to be depleted by 2019, when tax revenues would cover only 78 percent of program costs.

"The sooner these long-term financing problems are addressed, the more flexible and gradual the solutions can be," the Academy's Senior Health Fellow Cori Uccello said. "All of the presidential and congressional candidates must not only acknowledge these problems but also offer insights as to how they would address them."

The Academy has unveiled a new election 2008 Web resource center (http://www.actuary.org/issues/elect08.asp) to provide voters with the information they need to better understand Medicare, healthcare-reform issues and Social Security.

The resource center offers a healthcare-reform issues series on various topics, including rising healthcare spending, consumer-driven health plans, and medical insurance pooling mechanisms.