12 New Medicare Bills to Watch This Fall

Members of Congress have something wondrous on their desks: Medicare bills with bipartisan support. Republicans in the House seem to be gearing up to shut the government down, but meanwhile, many Republicans and Democrats seem to agree that it would be nice to expand Medicare obesity care benefits and update audiology services coverage rules. We came up with a list of Medicare bills with some sizzle by searching Congress.gov for legislation introduced since May 1 related to the topic of health, with at least one Democratic sponsor or co-sponsor and at least one Republican sponsor or co-sponsor. We looked for relatively short, focused bills that seem as if they could affect individual clients with Medicare, rather than big, ponderous bills that would mainly affect Medicare's inner workings. Because the Senate has only one-fourth as many members as the House, we multiplied its co-sponsor count by four when comparing Senate bills with House bills. For a look at what we found, see the gallery above. Some of these bills could jump from out of nowhere into shutdown prevention packages, but none is law at the moment. There is no guarantee that any bill in the gallery that becomes law will be implemented as written or work as either the drafters or the critics expect.