Re:The Company Behind Many Surprise Emergency Room Bills
by chimeracoder on Monday July 24, 2017 @03:21PM
(#14841745)
> Many private [Medicare] plans require no additional monthly premiums, yet the government pays an average of $849.90 in monthly subsidies to insurance companies for a person on Medicare Advantage, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation
That might be a reasonable comparison if Medicare's claims rates were self-sustaining, but they're not. As I explained in another comment on this thread, private insurers subsidize Original Medicare with their own payouts in claims, and that comes out a few orders of magnitude larger than 14% per Original Medicare patient.
I'd be interested to see these findings. Do you have links?
As far as Medicare Advantage is concerned, it's not the least bit surprising that patient satisfaction is higher. But I wouldn't go treating that as some kind of referendum on Government-run healthcare:
"Many private [Medicare] plans require no additional monthly premiums, yet the government pays an average of $849.90 in monthly subsidies to insurance companies for a person on Medicare Advantage, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. That is about 14 percent more than the government spends on people with standard Medicare, according to the nonpartisan Medicare Payment Advisory Commission."
MA was supposed to demonstrate that private insurers could deliver care at lower costs than Medicare, and it hasn't done that. Basically, for every $1.00 the gov spends on a medicare patient, it pays $1.14 in subsidies for an MA patient, with the evidence indicating a lot of that goes straight into the pockets of insurers as profit [2]
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10... [2] http://theincidentaleconomist.com/medicare-advantage-cuts-on...