Sharon Parsley (sharon.parsley@adventhealth.com) is a Regional Corporate Responsibility Officer for AdventHealth in Ocala, FL.
When the Medicare and Medicaid programs were created in 1965, there were approximately 19 million eligible Medicare beneficiaries.[1] According to a fascinating October 2019 blog post, titled The Future of Medicare Program Integrity by CMS Administrator Seema Verma, there are now approximately 71 million Medicare beneficiaries, with 10,000 new enrollees added daily.[2] Interestingly, that threefold increase in beneficiaries has yielded a tenfold increase in the percentage of aggregate federal spending for those programs, with expenditures rising from 2.3% of total federal spending to 23.5%.[3]