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The Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014 (; ) is a law that delays until March 2015 the pending cut to Medicare, a cut that has been regularly delayed for over a decade.〔〔 The law will not offset this spending with increased revenue or cuts to spending in other places, a source of controversy.〔〔 The bill was signed into law on April 1, 2014, during the 113th United States Congress. ==Background== (詳細はsocial insurance program, administered by the U.S. federal government since 1966, that guarantees access to health insurance for Americans aged 65 and older who have worked and paid into the system, younger people with disabilities, and a few other groups. As a social insurance program, Medicare spreads the financial risk associated with illness across society to protect everyone, and thus has a somewhat different social role from for-profit private insurers, which manage their risk portfolio by adjusting their pricing according to perceived risk. In 2010, Medicare provided health insurance to 48 million Americans—40 million people age 65 and older and eight million younger people with disabilities. It was the primary payer for an estimated 15.3 million inpatient stays in 2011, representing 47.2 percent ($182.7 billion) of total aggregate inpatient hospital costs in the United States.〔Torio CM, Andrews RM. National Inpatient Hospital Costs: The Most Expensive Conditions by Payer, 2011. HCUP Statistical Brief #160. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville, MD. August 2013. ()〕 On average, Medicare covers about half (48 percent) of health care costs for enrollees. Medicare enrollees must cover the rest of the cost. These out-of-pocket costs vary depending on the amount of health care a Medicare enrollee needs. They might include uncovered services—such as long-term, dental, hearing, and vision care—and supplemental insurance.〔(Kaiser Slides | The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation ). Facts.kff.org. Retrieved on 2013-07-17.〕 A formula, called the "Sustainable Growth Rate" (SGR) formula, was established in 1997 to make planned cuts to Medicare reimbursement rates.〔 Congress has regularly avoided making these cuts since then by passing legislation, colloquially known as the "doc fix", to delay the cuts.〔 Congress has been making these temporary changes for over a decade.〔 On March 14, 2014, the United States House of Representatives passed the SGR Repeal and Medicare Provider Payment Modernization Act of 2014 (H.R. 4015; 113th Congress), a bill that would have replaced the SGR formula, which determines the annual updates to payment rates for physicians’ services in Medicare, with new systems for establishing those payment rates.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.cbo.gov/publication/45149 )〕 However, the bill would pay for these changes by delaying the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate requirement, a provision that was very unpopular with Democrats. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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