Medicare: what's right? What's wrong? What's next?

Although future Medicare costs are highly uncertain, reasonable projections of those costs suggest a major financing problem. The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 will provide temporary relief, although it introduced some new problems, including its geographic adjustment of Medicare+Choice rates. For the future we propose a premium-support system and an expanded benefits package. Such a system would provide a more flexible means to adjust the division of the financing burden between the elderly and the nonelderly, potentially gain some efficiencies from greater price competition and less reliance on administered pricing, and partly address the issue of uninsured early retirees.