Top 10 Medicare Bills of 2022, So Far

Congress has had a hard time moving Medicare bills down the field so far this year. Members of Congress have introduced 198 stand-alone bills that include the word "Medicare" since Jan. 1. Many have long, bipartisan lists of co-sponsors. But only 12 of the bills have received committee hearings or bill markup sessions or moved out of committee. One of the bills that received committee attention simply reauthorized an existing stream of Medicare funding. Most of the others relate to activities of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency that oversees Medicare, that have little or nothing to do with Medicare. We came up with Medicare bill performance rankings by searching Congress.gov, the official congressional legislative tracking website, for bills that mention Medicare and either have moved out of committee or have at least attracted long, bipartisan lists of co-sponsors. For our top 10 results, see the slideshow gallery. The most successful bills relate to matters such a Medicare benefits for Christian scientists, synthetic opioid use and the methods Medicare plans use to decide in advance whether they will pay for operations or other relatively high-cost forms of patient care.

Ranking Mechanics

This list excludes any legislation packaged in the form of a bill amendment. It also excludes bills that relate solely to Medicare spending or that have little or nothing to do with Medicare health coverage. We ranked bills that are still stuck in committee by the total number of co-sponsors attracted, based on the possibility that having a large number of co-sponsors could help a bill reappear and, possibly, pass in the 118th Congress.

The Context

The 117th Congress is ending, halfway through the presidency of Joe Biden. Between Jan. 1, 2018, and Nov. 30, 2018, during the middle of the presidency of Donald Trump, Congress introduced 251 bills that mentioned the word "Medicare" and gave some kind of committee-level attention to 57. During the comparable period in 2014, during the middle of former President Barack Obama's second term, Congress gave committee-level attention to 16 of the 186 Medicare bills introduced during that period. (Image: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services)