Medicare Part C Updated from 2019 Trustees Report

Usgovernmentspending.com has updated its estimate of Medicare Part C, the Medicare Advantage program using data in the Medicare Trustees Report of 2018 that was released April 22, 2019. You can see the results here.

The Budget of the United States Government reports Medicare outlays as a single line item, subfunction 571 in Historical Table 3.2, but Usgovernmentspending.com shows a breakdown of the Medicare program into its constituent parts, as follows:

1. Part A: Hospital Insurance
2. Part B: Supplementary Medical Insurance
3. Part C: Medicare Advantage
4. Part D: SMI Drug Plan

These data are constructed from data in the Public Budget Database and Table IV.C2 in the Medicare Trustees Report 2019 which reports the payments made to private Medicare health plans and the projected payments in future years.

You can inspect the extracted data from Medicare Trustees Reports Table IV.C2 here. And see the blog entry that introduced the Medicare Part C breakout to usgovernmentspending.com here.

Here is a breakdown of Medicare budgeted outlays for 2021 before and after today's update.

Outlays in percent GDP	Part A	Part B	Part C	Part D	Total Medicare
FY2021 before update	0.87	0.73	1.08	0.42	3.10% GDP
FY2021 after update	0.84	0.71	1.14	0.42	3.11% GDP

The update indicates a 5.6 percent increase in Medicare Part C over the previous estimate in the Medicare Trustees Report in 2017.