Please contact your Senators and
Congressperson today to save Medicare Advantage. Here is why:
An older couple I know lives
independently nearby. They have little savings, no pension, just Social
Security.
When it came time for me to sign up for
Medicare, I asked them for advice. “Medicare Advantage” was their quick answer.
“Wouldn’t have anything else.” After comparison-shopping, I did the same.
Of the four and a half million
Californians on Medicare, 34% are in a Medicare Advantage plan. 50% of this
group have annual incomes under $20,000. Loss of these plans would be a
terrible burden. I believe it would be life shortening for this older couple.
MedAdv plans are better and cheaper for
several reasons. As HMOs they better coordinate—and therefore control—services
than regular Medicare. Participants cannot simply get any treatment they want.
(1)
MedAdv plans include aggressive
preventive programs to keep participants healthy, further lowering costs.
MedAdv receives more government funding because of this and because they
process the paperwork for the government.
Unfortunately for all of us, the White
House and the Congress plan to reduce or eliminate Medicare Advantage. This is
shortsighted and harmful.
A Liberal relative likes to remind me how
lucky
I am that a Democrat—President Lyndon Johnson—signed the original Medicare
bill.
Using my official Social Security
Statement, I added up all the Medicare taxes I paid in and included 5% per year
earnings. The total was an
astounding $142,636.00.
Worse yet, 10,000,000 current Medicare
Advantage participants are about to suffer at the hands of politicians:
- Medicare Advantage is to be scrapped.
Various bureaucratic techniques are to be implemented that control medical
services. Of course, Medicare Advantage already does that. (2)
- Medicare benefits will be “means tested.” Those who saved for retirement are about to be punished. While contrary to Medicare regulation, this is too rich a source of “hidden taxation’ for the government to pass up. (3)
- QALY or “quality-adjusted life years” will be used to direct medical care away from Seniors and to younger people. The effects will be huge. (4)
- Government Care would use QALY to “reduce access to care, pressure the
elderly to end their lives prematurely, and doom baby boomers to painful later
years.” Funding
to establish this has already been signed into law in the February stimulus
bill. QALY formulae approve or deny
medical care based on the cost of a treatment divided by the number of
years that the patient is likely to benefit. In Britain, the formula leads to
denying treatments for older patients who have fewer years to benefit from care
than younger patients. (5)
Strangely, President Obama
keeps saying “If you like your current plan, you can keep it.”
OK, Mr. President, how about it? Can we
keep our Medicare Advantage? After all, I paid $142,636.00 for it.
References
(1)
http://www.medicarechoices.org/medicare-information
(2) “Health Care Reform and You,” Main
Editorial, NY Times, Sunday, July 26, 2009. Week in Review p. 9. At the end of this long piece, the
editors describe a negative effect for older Americans: Congress is likely to
do away with Medicare Advantage plans to save some money. Yet a few sentences
later it says “Obama insisted that benefits won’t be reduced, they’ll simply be
delivered in more efficient ways, like better coordination of care, elimination
of duplicate tests and reliance on treatments known to work.” Medicare
Advantage is already doing that. The end of the editorial states “The
AARP, the main lobby for older Americans, has praised the emerging bills and
thrown its weight behind the cause.”
I have sold software to AARP. It is an insurance company that
pretends to be a lobbying organization! And no wonder they are “throwing their
weight behind” new health bill. AARP does NOT offer a Medicare Advantage
plan.
(3)
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/john-farrell/2009/03/09/obama-hides-medicare-means-testing-in-plain-sight--in-his-big-budget.html
(4) “Why We Must Ration Health Care,” NY
Times Magazine, July 29, 2009
(5) “GovernmentCare’s
Assault on Seniors” Wall St. Journal, July 30, 2009
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