This week, economist Austin Frakt outlined the economic and health impacts associated with Medicaid’s lack of dental coverage for adults in many states. These associations range from an increased risk of cancer and heart disease, to complications for pregnancy, to social stigma and difficulty finding work.
While Medicaid requires dental coverage for children, coverage for adults is optional. Currently, there are 17 states that offer comprehensive adult dental benefits.
Medicaid’s lack of a comprehensive adult dental benefit in most states makes the health and well-being of people with Medicaid less robust. But Medicaid’s sparse dental coverage is still superior to the coverage Medicare offers most beneficiaries.

Congress is trying to pass a new budget this week that includes many important Medicare provisions. One of these provisions is a worrisome extension of past practices: increasing the amount some people must pay for their Medicare benefits.

This week, the Senate Special Committee on Aging held a hearing titled Turning 65: Navigating Critical Decisions to Age Well to examine issues that older adults face as they near retirement age. In Medicare, two decisions are especially important for those who are newly eligible: when to enroll and what coverage option to choose. As the hearing highlighted, these issues have attainable solutions, namely the Beneficiary Enrollment Notification and Eligibility Simplification (BENES) Act and the State Health Insurance Assistance Program (SHIPs).

Last month, two health policy non-profits released detailed information and graphs about health spending in the U.S. The Peterson Center on Healthcare partnered with the Kaiser Family Foundation to create a Health System Tracker for health spending and other quality and cost trends in the health system.

In the past several years, the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMMI), part of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), has designed and implemented demonstration projects and models to try new ways of paying providers to deliver health care to people with Medicare. These tests of new designs attempt to see if there are ways providers can be paid that will increase the quality of care people receive while either keeping costs stable or, ideally, lowering them.

As Congress moves quickly to send a tax bill to the President before the end of the year, the Senate is now closer to passing their version of the bill. The Senate cleared key process hurdles this week, passing their bill out of committee and passing a Motion to Proceed that allows the bill to be introduced on the Senate floor. Now Senators have a maximum of 20 hours of debate, plus a series of quick votes on an unknown number of amendments that various Senators may offer, known as “vote-a-rama.”

This week, the Medicare Rights Center joined with the AARP Public Policy Institute to release a new report, Consumer Protections in New Medicare Payment and Delivery Models: A Checklist. This checklist is the result of a partnership between Medicare Rights and the AARP Public Policy Institute in which we identified a set of concrete consumer protections that we believe should be integrated into the design of all Medicare models.

As 2017 winds down, there are several smaller pieces of Medicare legislation, often called “Medicare extenders,” that must pass Congress to keep the program stable in 2018. Extenders establish programs for a short time, and have to be passed or funded by Congress every one to two years. Two extenders are particularly important to people with Medicare: the low-income outreach and assistance extender and the therapy cap exception extender. Both extenders will expire in December of 2017 if Congress does not act.

This week, members of both chambers of Congress introduced a bill that aims to bring down rising drug costs. Representatives Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), Lloyd Doggett (D-Tx.), and Peter Welch (D-Vt.) joined with Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) to introduce The Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Act of 2017, which would use several mechanisms to lower drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries while maintaining patient access to needed medications.

Today, the Medicare Rights Center sent a letter to leaders of the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce voicing opposition to legislation that would shifts costs to people with Medicare. Importantly, the “Helping Ensure Access for Little Ones, Toddlers, and Hopeful Youth by Keeping Insurance Delivery Stable Act of 2017” (HEALTHY KIDS Act), would provide needed funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Unfortunately, however, the bill pays for this funding, in part, by requiring some higher-income people with Medicare to pay more than they already do for Medicare coverage.