New Bi-Partisan Research Group to Focus on Medicare Fiscal Trends

Two top Republican and Democratic health policy experts are coming together to form a research-oriented advocacy group that says its goal is to “preserve Medicare.” The Partnership for the Future of Medicare — led by former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Kenneth Thorpe, who led health policy at HHS during the first two years of the Clinton administration — is going to research topics relevant to the Medicare debate during sequestration and beyond.

The group is funded by insurance companies United Health and Humana. But Holtz-Eakin says its decisions and research are not going to be skewed toward the interests of the insurance industry. The group’s initial research will focus on the fiscal challenges facing Medicare, utilization and patterns in Medicare Advantage and fee-for-service programs, and the value of Medicare Advantage plans. Thorpe said one of the group’s goals is “to make sure people understand the factors driving the growth in Medicare spending [and] how those trends are going to persist.”

Thorpe and Holtz-Eakin said that they expect to be around longer than the sequestration talk on Capitol Hill. The debate over Medicare’s sustainability is going to last far longer, they say. The group’s advisory board is made up of: Holtz-Eakin; Thorpe; Katherine Baicker, a professor of health economics at the Harvard School of Public Health; James C. Capretta, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and an associate director of the Office of Management and Budget under President George W. Bush; and Kavita Patel and Steven M. Lieberman, both of the Brookings Institution.