In a new study, Chuck Blahous, who is a public trustee for Medicare and Social Security, concludes that the 2010 health law will add at least $340 billion to the federal deficit from 2012-2021. This is contrary to the official estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, which initially figured the Affordable Care Act would reduce the [...]

It is the unfounded rumor that never dies: You will have to pay a 3.8 percent federal health care tax on the sale of your house. For all but a handful of taxpayers, this is not true. It is wrong. It is urban myth. It is the revenue equivalent of death panels or the Halliburton [...]

There is more to the Affordable Care Act than the individual mandate. There are also, for example, taxes. And since this is TaxVox, I thought it would be useful to think about some of those revenue provisions in the wake of the Supreme Court’s three-day hearing on the fate of the ACA. The law includes [...]

The other day, I criticized the unwillingness of Congress to finance the latest extension of the payroll tax cut. Since that blog, the Congressional Budget Office released its estimates of the cost of the entire mini-stimulus, including the so-called “doc fix” and changes in unemployment compensation. And the games were even worse than I feared. [...]

On a day when Washington partisans couldn’t even figure out (yet again) how to keep the government running, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) did a remarkable thing: They announced a bipartisan plan to fix Medicare, probably the most contentious of policy issues. And amazingly, what they came up [...]

In just a few years, the 2010 health reform law will begin providing subsidies to help low- and moderate-income people buy health insurance. And that assistance is supposed to be delivered through tax credits—with payments going directly from the IRS to insurance companies.  But will those credits actually work? Maybe, but it won’t be easy. [...]

The House Republican plan to replace Medicare with vouchers could lower national health spending in only one of two ways: Either seniors would respond to higher out-of-pocket costs by using less—or more efficient–health care, or private insurance companies would ration their care for them. In effect, insurance company bureaucrats would replace those government bureaucrats so [...]

Want to know why caps on federal spending will never work? Just take a look at proposed Medicare vouchers that are included in the House-passed 2012 budget framework.  Faced with an arbitrary ceiling on spending, a determined Congress could easily turn those subsidies into tax credits. They’d  be exempt from spending limits but still add billions [...]

The Community Living Services and Supports (CLASS) Act is an extraordinary case study in both budget and health care politics, and in the toxic political environment in which those of us in Washington live. And it puts a critical question into stark focus:  Exactly how do we, as a society, want to provide for the [...]

Could Congress replace the current Medicare system with a voucher program, as former Clinton budget director Alice Rivlin and House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) among others have suggested? It could if Republicans allow the 2010 health law to take effect and Democrats can bring themselves to stop defending a deeply flawed Medicare program. [...]