Last night’s State of the Union address was full of proposals and promises for everything from job creation to gun control. The problem with an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink speech, however, is making heads or tails of it.
As viewers know, President Obama devoted a fair amount of his more-than-an-hour-long address to Medicare. But many are still trying to figure out what it will all boil down to. To get a clear picture of what the future of Medicare could look like, Sarah Cliff of the Washington Post took Obama’s words and broke them down into easy-to-digest pieces.
She said that there were three salient messages delivered last night, which include “bringing Medicaid drug rebates to Medicare Part D, means-testing the Medicare program for higher-income seniors and moving toward pay-for-performance reimbursement methods.”
Each of those topics have the

opportunity to affect seniors – but hopefully in a good way. By bringing Medicaid drug rebates to Medicare Part D, seniors could potentially pay much less for their prescription medication. By means-testing the Medicare program for higher-income seniors, the CBO estimates that $30 billion in savings could be generated over the course of a decade – a method to protect those who will need to rely on Medicare in the future.
Finally, by moving toward pay-for-performance reimbursement methods, overall care could improve by leaps and bounds. Cliff admitted in her piece, however, that the suggested policy isn’t necessarily specific on how to go about paying more to hospitals that provide quality care.

Surely these topics will continue to unfold in the upcoming weeks and months. And we here at Freedom Home Care will do our best to keep you in the loop. Stay tuned.