Health insurers launched an aggressive campaign today to keep the Senate from cutting Medicare Advantage funding included in the budget for the current fiscal year.[@@]
Lawmakers have included Medicare Advantage funding provisions in S. 1932, a long budget reconciliation bill.
The bill, which is being debated this week on the Senate floor, also could end up including a provision that would expand the kinds of long term care insurance partnerships that California, Connecticut, Indiana and New York now offer along with another provision that could affect consumer efforts to qualify for Medicaid LTC benefits by transferring assets to others.
The bill appears to be in flux, and whether the insurance-related provisions will stay in the bill and what the final wording of any surviving insurance-related provisions will be remains to be determined.
S. 1932 combines separate budget packages that recently were approved by 8 different Senate committees, including the Senate Finance Committee. This legislation proposes a total of $39.1 billion in budget cuts over the next 5 years.
The Senate Budget and Finance Committees have proposed additional cuts in the government's budget for health care programs as part of an effort to pay for Hurricane Katrina aid without adding to the budget deficit.
Maximum funding in the budget reconciliation legislation was set last spring, long before the current hurricane season began, and that proposal alone called for cuts of $12 billion in spending that Congress authorized just 2 years ago. The total impact of additional cuts on Medicare and Medicaid programs is unclear.
Already shaved from the program in the budget approved last spring are provisions approved 2 years ago that would legislate the phase-down of budget neutrality for the Medicare Advantage risk adjuster and eliminate the Medicare Advantage regional stabilization fund.
