trustees report
The real drain on Medicare
Georgetown University/Medicare Trustees
Outpatient care is the biggest factor draining Medicare funds, the latest data from Medicare’s trustees show. Prescription drugs are eating up a bigger portion, too.
Hospital care, of course, is expensive. But experts from Georgetown University plotted out Medicare spending and how much hospitals, outpatient care, and drugs contribute toward it. They found that spending on Medicare’s Part B benefit — which covers physician visits, care in hospital outpatient departments, and physician-administered drugs like IV medications — “dwarfs” spending for inpatient care ($584 billion in 2025 vs. $444 billion). It turns out shifting more care into the outpatient setting isn’t as big of a bargain as health care leaders make it out to be.
In fact, this shift is crushing seniors’ pocketbooks. Medicare Part B can’t go insolvent like Part A, because it’s a mixture of general government revenue and premiums paid directly by beneficiaries. That means if government revenue doesn’t cover everything, beneficiaries pick up the rest. Seniors are currently paying more than $200 per month for their Part B premium — an extremely high amount for people living off Social Security — and it almost certainly won’t get cheaper for 2027.
GLP-1
Bread crumb on Bridge
We still don’t know how much Medicare’s experiment to pay for weight loss drugs will cost. Medicare’s trustees last week gave a very small (but mostly unhelpful) clue.
Buried in one of the charts on Medicare’s Part D spending (Table IV.B10 for the sickos), the trustees wrote, “The projected cost of the GLP-1 Bridge demonstration program in 2026 is also included.” That column, which represents a bunch of subsidies and other unknown costs or transfers from prescription drug plans, shows $4.4 billion in 2026.
The column mixes together too many unclear things of uncertain sizes to say anything other than, “The GLP-1 Bridge program will be costly.” CMS also could just release its internal estimates.
