How much will it cost to fill the doughnut hole?
An estimate by the Congressional Budget Office says closing the coverage gap will cost the federal government $42.6 billion by 2019. But, the federal subsidies that will help close the doughnut hole will be phased in slowly. The full subsidies will not be in effect until 2020, after the period captured in the cost estimates. And the cost of filling the hole would increase in the following years. This story was produced through collaboration between NPR and Kaiser Health News (KHN), an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health-care policy research organization. The Kaiser Family Foundation is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
