Sponsors
The bill substantially increases transparency and analytic usefulness of Medicare spending data for beneficiaries, researchers, and policymakers, at the cost of added administrative expense and heightened privacy/re‑identification risks that must be managed.
Medicare beneficiaries, taxpayers, and policymakers gain substantially improved transparency about local per‑beneficiary Medicare spending and enrollment patterns through regular public reporting.
Researchers, state and local policymakers, and health systems can use up to 10 years of historic and up to 5 years of projected monthly data to plan services, manage costs, and evaluate trends.
The bill mandates public release of data and pre‑published methodology tied to official CMS Chief Actuary and Trustees' estimates, increasing credibility and enabling replication and informed critique of analyses.
Medicare beneficiaries face heightened privacy and re‑identification risk if detailed local spending and enrollment data are released without sufficiently strong confidentiality protections.
Preparing, aggregating, publishing, and maintaining the detailed historical, projected, and disaggregated data will impose additional administrative costs on CMS, the Medicare Trustees, and MedPAC that are ultimately borne by taxpayers and may divert staff time.
Excluding adjustments for favorable selection in published comparisons risks overstating cost differences between Medicare Advantage and traditional Medicare and could mislead public and policy debates.
Based on analysis of 4 sections of legislative text.
Introduced February 11, 2026 by Tim Scott · Last progress February 11, 2026
Requires HHS/CMS to publish county- and MSA-level Medicare enrollment and expenditure data in machine-readable form and requires MedPAC and the Medicare Trustees to publish new, detailed comparisons and breakout reporting, with the first required reports and publications beginning with 2027. The law mandates multi-year historical (10 years) monthly data and limited multi-year projections (up to 5 years), disaggregation by specific beneficiary categories (Parts A/B/C/D, supplemental and employer plans, and certain federal and group plans), and public, reproducible analyses comparing Medicare Advantage and traditional Medicare spending.