For almost the past three years, every time the Congressional Budget Office comes out with a new budget baseline they reveal they've had to revise downward their estimates for how much Medicare and Medicaid will cost each year. They even just did it twice in the span of six months: first they revised their Medicare projections down last August ("Medicare spending forecast reduced in new CBO analysis") and then this month they revised downward those already-revised-downward estimates ("CBO: Medicare spending slowing faster than expected"). The head of the CBO took to his blog today to identify one of the culprits: an unexpected and sustained slowdown in health spending growth throughout the entire economy. Interesting times.
No one shifts out of Medicare coverage; enrollment in Medicare has been and is only going to continue to grow as the population ages into it. What's interesting, though, is not only that Medicare's growth on a per capita basis is as low as it's ever been ("The slow growth in spending per beneficiary from 2010 to 2012 combined with the projections of spending growth at GDP+0 for 2012-2022 is unprecedented in the history of the Medicare program.") but health spending throughout the entire economy has remained slow.
