Medicare premiums hold the line -- increasing $1 in price from the past three years

Aug 1 2013

The Obama administration cast the average monthly premium price increase as a matter of inches.

The Associated Press/Washington Post: Gov't.: Average Monthly Premium For Medicare Drug Plans Will Rise By $1 For 2012, To $31
The Obama administration says the average monthly premium for Medicare prescription drug plans will inch up by $1 next year, to $31. The increase comes after three stable years in which the average premium hovered around $30 a month (7/30).

USA Today: Medicare Premiums To Remain Stable In 2014
Medicare Part D premiums will average about $31 in 2014 -; up from $30 for the past three years. The Part D deductible will fall from $325 to $310 in 2014. "There is continued very strong competition within the Part D plan," said Jonathan Blum, deputy administrator and director for the Center of Medicare. When the coverage gap program began, "there was lots of concern that filling in the doughnut hole would cause Part D costs to go up" (Kennedy, 7/30).

In other Medicare news -

Fiscal Times: Will Killing The 'Doc Fix' Push More MDs From Medicare?
Beyond the headlines of the rocky roll-out of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, is a much more dramatic story. Many in Congress want to axe the Sustainable Growth Rate that pays physicians for Medicare patients. If Congress succeeds in scrapping legislation that caps doctor payments for Medicare, it may replace it with a game-changing formula that represents a new paradigm for healthcare compensation. The SGR, hated by doctors and sidestepped by lawmakers on an annual basis, will automatically force a 24-percent cut in physician payments next year, unless Congress votes to abandon it. That seems likely. To date, though, Congress has voted 15 times since 2002 to override the SGR with temporary "doc fixes" (Wasik, 7/31).