Medicare Advantage plans may face cuts

[marvinsacco]

Source: AP foreign

Associated Press= WASHINGTON (AP) — Cuts are on the table next year for Medicare Advantage plans, the Obama administration says. The politically dicey move affecting a private insurance alternative highly popular with seniors immediately touched off an election-year fight.

The announcement gave new ammunition to Republican critics of President Barack Obama's health care law, while disappointing some Democratic senators who had called on the administration to hold rates steady. Insurers are still hoping to whittle back the cuts or dodge them altogether.

Late Friday after financial markets closed, Medicare issued a 148-page assessment of cost factors for the private plans next year. It included multiple variables, some moving in different directions, but analyst Matthew Eyles of Avalere Health estimated it would translate to a cut of 1.9 percent for 2015, a figure also cited by congressional staffers briefed on the proposal.

"There's nothing to like here if you're one of the plans," said Eyles.

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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/feedarticle/11218577

---

Read more

[uppityperson]

2. Thanks for editing to shorten it. Welcome to DU, what do you think about this?

[BodieTown]

3. "Medicare Advantage" Is A Corporate SCAM

People read "Medicare", and they automatically think, "It's being cut!"

Not hardly.

Medicare Advantage was an attempt by corporate politicians and healthcare insurance corporations to prove that privatized Medicare could work.

It's been a failure for taxpayers, nothing but a way for private insurers to fleece taxpayers and skim profit off of us.

Medicare Advantage has cost taxpayers approximately one-fourth to one-third of a trillion dollars more than good old Medicare without corporate profit-taking.

"Dicey move", my ass. Granted, for 'cons it's yet another propaganda opportunity because they're going to pounce on this and holler from the rooftops, "Medicare as we know it is being cut!!!"

And that is why the 'cons wanted the word "Medicare" in Medicare Advantage from the beginning. Snakes; all of them.

[jwirr]

5. Exactly. The truth is that the Medicare program provides everything that the M-Advantage plan

does. They tell us they offer more when they try to get us to sign up but all they are offering is a privatized form of Medicare which cost the Medicare more when used. IMO they should be ended.

[RebelOne]

11. You are wrong. I have the basic Medicare program,

and it does not include an annual medical deductible of $0.00. I just had cataract surgery and had to pay $240 to cover my deductible.

And I do not have the additional services of dental discount or vision discount that are all included in Medicare Advantage.

[jwirr]

12. Oops

[Lasher]

4. We need to reduce excess taxpayer subsidies to private Medicare Advantage insurance companies.

I wish Obama and Congressional Democrats could frame this properly.

[okaawhatever]

8. I don't think the issue is Obama or the Dems, it's the media. The media has the choice to tell us

the unbiased truth or promote more corporate propaganda, if history is the guide it will be propaganda.

[Lasher]

9. That's true about the corporate media but Obama and Congressional Democrats are not doing enough

...in this respect - if anything at all. They could do a lot more to properly frame this issue. For example, don't use the misleading label, Medicare Advantage. Call it something more accurate, like Taxpayer Subsidized Corporate Medicare. They should do it repeatedly, without deviation.

[sinkingfeeling]

6. Medicare Advantage plans have always cost the taxpayers more money.

[Historic NY]

7. Medicare Advantage isn't Medicare!!!!!!!!

people are being led to believe it is.

[truebluegreen]

10. The ACA cuts the subsidies to private Medicare Advantage companies,

thereby saving beaucoup bucks for the taxpayer. Fux Noise and the reichwing will be the first to support this, of course, on the basis of the free market and deficit reduction.

Private health plans, now called Medicare Advantage plans, were first allowed to participate in Medicare because some policymakers believed they could provide better services at a lower cost than traditional Medicare. In fact, because it was anticipated private plans would be so efficient, the government initially paid them five percent less for each beneficiary they enrolled than it would have cost to cover that same beneficiary in traditional Medicare.

In 25 years time, the powerful health insurance industry lobby has been extremely successful in turning this rationalization on its head. Instead of paying private plans less to reflect the efficiencies they argued would save the government money, Medicare now pays them significantly more than it would cost to cover the same beneficiaries through traditional fee-for-service Medicare. In fact, today the government pays an average of 14 percent more to cover a beneficiary in a private Medicare Advantage plan than it would cost to cover that same beneficiary in traditional Medicare. And some types of private plans can receive much larger payments.

[daybranch]

13. no special deals

for medicare advantage lovers. The subsidy should stop.