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May 16, 2013 Marilyn Tavenner, who has been running the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services in an acting capacity since late 2011, has a big job. The agency oversees health coverage for more than 100 million Americans.

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April 11, 2013 The administration's budget still matters, even though it's late and the House and Senate have approved their own spending blueprints for fiscal 2014. President Obama laid down markers that could lead to changes in Medicare and Medicaid and affect funding for a broad array of health programs.

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March 26, 2013 Arkansas is proposing to enroll people newly eligible for Medicaid in the same private insurance plans available to individuals and small businesses. It's caught the attention of several other Republican-run states that had been holding out on the Medicaid expansion.

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February 20, 2013 Can for-profit insurers save money while providing proper care for some of the sickest patients? For years, Arizona, a state that doesn't often champion government programs, has been enlisting private companies to manage the care for people eligible for both Medicare and Medicare.

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January 1, 2013 In October 2013, open enrollment begins, when people can start signing up for their 2014 coverage through the new state-run health exchanges. But most of the changes in 2013 are tax increases and cuts in tax deductions to pay for the 2014 changes.

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December 14, 2012 Means testing Medicare is one of the few areas where Democrats have shown a willingness to even consider the subject of spending less on the program. But not everyone supports that idea.

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December 12, 2012 Democrats are worried that cuts to the program will go beyond the impact on the people it serves. It will also affect the Affordable Care Act, which calls for expanding Medicaid to as many as 16 million more people. The states are watching closely because the federal government has promised it will pay most of those additional costs.

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October 25, 2012 With January's fiscal cliff on the horizon, Medicare and Medicaid face some serious budget woes. Two studies and a lawsuit could shape their fate.

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October 17, 2012 KHNAs the long, slow demise of company-sponsored retiree health insurance continues, some firms are contracting with Medicare exchanges to try to ease the transition for their former employees.

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October 16, 2012 Medicare is emerging as the most important health care voting issue — more important than even the Affordable Care Act. And with 10,000 baby boomers qualifying for the program every day, whoever wins the election will have to find some way to rein in spending.

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October 12, 2012 Fact checkers have raised some flags about some of the claims the candidates made regarding Medicare. Ryan tried to insist that his Medicare plan is bipartisan, while Biden at one point may have confused Medicare with Medicaid.

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August 13, 2012 Medicaid is a campaign issue for the first time in years. Republicans cite studies to say the health care program for those with low incomes has failed, and they want to turn it back to the states. But Medicaid researchers say those studies don't portray Medicaid accurately.

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May 10, 2012 KHNThe government has identified hundreds of hospitals where Medicare patients are incurring especially high or low bills. Hospitals around McAllen, it turns out, aren't as terrible as they were made out to be, according to Medicare's calculations of how much it spent for the average patient from three days before admission to a month after discharge.

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