Public Health and Prevention

To enhance its work for the Congress, CBO is looking for new research on factors that affect the use of anti-obesity medications and the impact of that use on other health care spending.

CBO estimates the budgetary effects of options for expanding federal Medicaid payments to states for services provided to Medicaid enrollees ages 21 to 64 who are in inpatient facilities known as institutions for mental diseases.

CBO describes the effects and evolution of the opioid crisis in the United States, the factors that have contributed to it, the laws enacted to address it, and the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on the crisis.

Preventive medical care includes services that can prevent diseases from occurring and detect diseases before symptoms appear. This report describes how CBO estimates the effects on the federal budget of proposals to expand the use of such services.

Given the high degree of interest in the relationship between people’s health and the federal budget, this post recaps some highlights from CBO’s report titled Raising the Excise Tax on Cigarettes: Effects on Health and the Federal Budget.

CBO has analyzed the impact of a hypothetical increase in the federal excise tax on cigarettes to demonstrate the complex links between policies that aim to improve health and effects on the federal budget.