Understanding the Medicare Bills

A Primer from Kaiser Family Foundation

July 21, 2003
The Kaiser Family Foundation has provided an information resource for those trying to decipher the competing Medicare bills in Congress. The document, prepared for KFF by Health Policy Alternatives, Inc., provides a side-by-side comparison of the House and Senate Medicare proposals, as passed in June.

It describes key provisions of H.R. 1, The Medicare Prescription Drug and Modernization Act of 2003, and S. 1, The Prescription Drug and Medicare Improvement Act of 2003 and includes additional detail on payments to health plans and the provisions on premium support in the House bill.

The Foundation will release a longer, more-detailed comparison of the two bills shortly and will continue to update this side-by-side to reflect the conference agreement.

KFF has also prepared briefing charts that provide background information on prescription drug use and spending among the Medicare population, recent survey data on employers' likely reaction to a Medicare drug benefit, an overview of the proposals for prescription drug coverage passed by the House and Senate at the end of June 2003, and a summary of the key issues to be resolved in the conference.