Sponsors
The bill substantially increases transparency and data accessibility about who drives Medicare costs—helping policymakers, researchers, and the public target reforms and identify savings—while raising serious privacy risks and adding administrative costs and potential for misinterpretation that could harm small populations or produce misleading policy conclusions.
Medicare beneficiaries, taxpayers, state and local policymakers, and researchers gain much greater, multi-year, county/MSA- and program-level transparency into Medicare spending and enrollment (monthly and historical/projections), enabling targeted policy, oversight, and local care improvements.
Developers, analysts, hospitals, and researchers can build tools and local dashboards from standardized, machine-readable files published soon after year-end, making analyses reproducible and lowering the friction to generate local insights.
Taxpayers and policymakers obtain annual, replicable comparisons of Medicare Advantage versus Traditional Medicare spending, revealing areas of potential cost savings and informing payment policy decisions.
Medicare beneficiaries and small or vulnerable subgroups face heightened risk of re-identification and privacy breaches from detailed geographic and beneficiary‑category disclosures if de-identification safeguards are inadequate.
Federal agencies (CMS, Medicare trustees, MedPAC) and ultimately taxpayers will incur increased administrative, analytic, and compliance costs to prepare, validate, and publish more granular datasets, projections, and annual replicable analyses.
State/local policymakers, providers, and the public may misinterpret raw expenditure differences (without adequate risk adjustment), leading to unfair scrutiny of providers or misguided local policy responses.
Based on analysis of 4 sections of legislative text.
Requires CMS, MedPAC, and the Medicare trustees to publish detailed county/MSA Medicare spending data and a published comparison of Medicare Advantage vs traditional Medicare spending starting in 2027.
Introduced February 11, 2026 by Tim Scott · Last progress February 11, 2026
Requires federal Medicare agencies to publish much more detailed spending and enrollment data at county and metropolitan levels and to produce a public comparison of Medicare Advantage (Part C) spending versus traditional Medicare spending. Beginning in 2027, CMS must post machine-readable monthly and average Part A and B expenditures (historical and limited projections) broken out by many enrollment categories; MedPAC must publish a retrospective, adjusted comparison of average MA vs. traditional Medicare expenditures; and the Medicare trustees must add disaggregated expenditure tables to their annual reports.