Medicare to add diabetes prevention strategy

Medicare will start paying for a strategy to help millions of older Americans at high risk of diabetes from developing the disease, federal health officials announced this week (Source: “Medicare to begin paying for diabetes prevention strategy,” Washington Post, Nov. 2, 2016).

The new benefits, scheduled to begin in 2018, are part of an increasing shift in the federal entitlement program, from its half-century tradition of mainly covering treatment when beneficiaries are sick to paying to try to keep them healthy. The strategy to avert diabetes also is the first disease-prevention experiment, tested under part of the Affordable Care Act, which federal officials have concluded is worthwhile enough to adopt nationwide.