Unsustainably high healthcare costs paint bleak long-term budget outlook

Financial outlook is grim for not-for-profits, analyst says

Despite curtails in federal healthcare costs, the state of the nation's budget remains grim, a government report finds.

Passage of the Affordable Care Act and the Budget Control Act of 2012 improved the budget outlook, but neither are enough to fix the gap between spending and revenue, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.

“While the [Budget Control Act] improved the outlook, it did not eliminate the longer-term challenge, in part because it did not focus on the fundamental drivers of the government's future fiscal imbalances — a structural gap between revenues and spending driven by rising health care costs and demographics,” the report states.

Cost-control measures in the ACA will minimize the growth in money spent on federal health care. However, Medicare Trustees, the Congressional Budget Office and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services actuary remain concerned about the sustainability of certain health care cost-control measures over the long term, the report states.

“For example, they note that reductions in physician payment rates scheduled to occur under current law have routinely been overridden,” the report states.

Click here to read the full report.