Congressional Budget Office (CBO) news and information

The Obama administration's recent decision to delay the 2010 healthcare reform law's employer mandate by a year is estimated to increase the law's net cost to the federal government by $12 billion over 10 years, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation announced...
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Despite two months of pain induced by Medicare cuts under the deficit-reduction law triggered this year, advocates for hospitals and physicians are waiting until fall to push a legislative fix.
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The CBO estimates that the policies in the president's fiscal 2014 budget proposal would curb Medicare spending by about $364 billion over 10 years.
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Congressional Budget Office analysts sharply lowered their projections for the next decade's outlays on Medicare, Medicaid and covering the uninsured under the healthcare reform law.
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HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius again assured federal lawmakers that the health insurance exchanges will be ready for enrollment this fall, and also said her department does not have a contingency plan in place if HHS doesn't achieve that goal.
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Legislation that provides a permanent fix to Medicare's controversial sustainable growth-rate formula used in calculating physician reimbursement could be introduced in the Senate this year, according to a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
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What goes down, sometimes also comes back up. And that worries Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas), a physician representing the northwest suburbs of Dallas who co-chairs the Congressional Health Caucus and is vice chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's health subcommittee.
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Medical groups need to tell their stories on how federal regulations are affecting their operations and it would be helpful if the physicians in those groups contributed financially to lobbying efforts, according to speakers at the American Medical Group Association annual conference, which ended...
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Joe Carlson's interview with outgoing Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz (“Championing consumers,”) repeated one of the chairman's favorite catchphrases, “pay-for-delay,” in the...
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Momentum is building among House leaders to draft and introduce legislation this year that would repeal Medicare's troublesome sustainable growth-rate formula used to pay physicians, but upcoming budget battles could thwart those efforts.
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