Another Look at the ACA and the Federal Budget

Chuck Blahous is on the case.  In one chart:

 His main point:

Why are these dire fiscal consequences not more widely understood? A great source of confusion lies in government scorekeeping methods, which compare the effects of legislation to a hypothetical baseline scenario rather than to enacted law. To understand the difference, it is necessarily to go briefly into the weeds of Medicare trust fund accounting.

The ACA contains many provisions designed to slow the growth of Medicare spending. This matters here because the federal Medicare program is financed in a particular way – from special, separate trust funds. The Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) Trust Fund in particular is governed under law by certain rules. Medicare HI is only permitted to spend money on benefits as long as there is a positive balance in its trust fund. If that trust fund is depleted, then under law benefit payments must automatically be cut to the level that can be financed from incoming tax revenues.

This is relevant to an evaluation of the ACA because the CMS Medicare Actuary has projected that had the ACA not been passed the Medicare HI Trust Fund would have been depleted in 2016. If that were allowed to happen, Medicare HI payments would have been sharply cut in that year.

Due to the ACA’s Medicare cost-savings provisions, however, these automatic spending cuts are no longer projected to begin in 2016. Medicare HI is now projected to remain solvent until 2024, postponing forced outlay reductions until then. In other words, the ACA’s Medicare provisions decrease the level of Medicare HI spending prior to 2016, but then increase it from 2016-2024 relative to previous law. Considered separate and apart that would be a good thing, but it has inescapable fiscal ramifications in the context of the ACA’s other spending expansions.

Here’s a simple way to think of it: under law Medicare is permitted to spend any proceeds of savings in the Medicare HI program. If we cut $1 from Medicare HI spending in the near term, then an additional $1 is credited to the HI Trust Fund as a result. The Trust Fund thus lasts longer and its spending authority is expanded, permitting it to spend another $1 in a later year.

A core fiscal problem with the ACA is that the same $1 in Medicare savings that expands Medicare’s future spending authority by $1 is also assumed to finance the creation of a large new federal health program. Taken together, these two expansions of spending authorities – the new health program and Medicare’s solvency extension – far exceed the cost-savings in the legislation.

Read the whole thing.

Update:  Jonathan Chait has done so and concludes the study is bogus, since the more reasonable assumption is that Medicare Part A spending would have been authorized at projected levels even after the Trust Fund is exhausted.  The claims in Chait's post that "If Blahous’s assumptions are right, then we don’t really have an entitlement problem at all. Medicare can’t exceed its trust fund, so problem solved!" technically only apply to Part A.  Parts B and D are funded primarily out of general revenues and secondarily out of premiums, and their costs will continue to grow.