Last Friday, the Medicare trustees released their annual report on the state of Medicare’s finances. And, yesterday, the American Enterprise Institute held its annual event on the report, moderated by AEI’s Joe Antos. The session always features a presentation on the report’s main findings by a representative from the office of the actuary that prepares the report. For many years, that task fell to long-serving chief actuary Richard Foster, but Mr. Foster retired earlier this year after a distinguished career. So, yesterday, Paul Spitalnic, the acting chief actuary for Medicare, performed the duty for the first time, and did so admirably.
The rest of the session featured comments on the state of health care costs and Medicare by Mark Pauly of the University of Pennsylvania, Chapin White of the Center for Studying Health System Change, and myself, followed by a question and answer session with the audience.
Video of the entire AEI event can be viewed here. In addition, the slides that I used for my presentation are available at the bottom of the same event page.