Projected Medicaid Spending Has Fallen By $200 Billion

CBPP:

We’ve already noted that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has reduced its projection of cumulative Medicare spending over the 2011-2020 period by more than $500 billion based on a comparison of CBO’s latest estimates with those of August 2010.  The story’s basically the same for Medicaid:  CBO similarly has reduced its estimate of projected federal spending on the program over the same years by about $218 billion, or 6.4 percent.

The chart below compares CBO’s projection of Medicaid spending from August 2010 with the projection that CBO released in February.  We exclude spending related to the Medicaid expansion under health reform (including the effects of the Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act) and focus on projected spending in the underlying Medicaid program: