Congressional oversight of new services added to coverage could avert a disaster for federal debt.
President Biden and House Republicans struck a debt-ceiling deal that avoids tackling the real driver of federal deficits: Medicare. Left untouched, the program is going to cause a debt disaster. Yet new research from the Manhattan Institute proves that this isn’t inevitable—Washington could reform Medicare and protect its beneficiaries at the same time.
In a way, it isn’t surprising that House Republicans refused to include meaningful Medicare reform in their debt-ceiling bill. As Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, once put it: “Social Security is Grenada; Medicare is Vietnam.” Democrats have been hostile to attempts to reform Medicare since the program’s inception, and they’ve recently been joined by GOP populists. House Republicans were terrified of the political fallout.
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Chris Pope is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here. Based on a new report.
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