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Remember “Medicare Advantage” is neither “Medicare” nor is there any “Advantage.” It should be a crime that private insurance companies are allowed to use the term “Medicare” which conveys some form of approval or oversight by the US government for these plans. There is no oversight or approval. It is a private insurance scam that is draining the Medicare system of funds while shorting customers on service.

Now doctors and hospitals are withdrawing from using these plans because the plans refuse to pay for services. Real Medicare does pay and it pays on time. Note also that if you have one of these private policies you MUST use doctors and hospitals in network or you have no coverage. 

Unfortunately, once you get “Medicare Advantage” moving to real Medicare is not so easy. I do not have any prescription for getting out of the Advantage system. If it were me I would call the government Medicare system and see what can be done. Remember insurance agents are there to sell you insurance which is what Medicare Advantage is.

I recently wrote on the scam of Medicare Advantage a couple of weeks ago. You can read it here.

These private insurance Advantage plans are also having a big effect on rural hospitals. As explained here in an analysis from NPR, the private Advantage plans create real problems for rural hospitals:

Kelly Adams is the CEO of Mesa View Regional Hospital, another rural hospital in Nevada. He says he applauds Battle Mountain’s Bleak for keeping Medicare Advantage plans out of his hospital “as long as he has.”

Mesa View, which is a little more than an hour’s drive east of Las Vegas, has a high percentage of patients enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans.

“Am I going to say I’m not going to take care of 40% of our patients at the hospital or the clinic?” Adams says, adding that it would be a “tough deal” to be forced to reject patients because they didn’t have traditional Medicare.

Mesa View has 21 Medicare Advantage contracts with multiple insurance companies. Adams says he has trouble getting the plans to pay for care the hospital has provided. They are either “slow pay or no pay,” he said.

With slow pay or no pay, eventually hospitals – especially smaller hospitals – will have to shut down. 

As with many of the problems facing life in the USA here days, the privatized Advantage programs are a creation of the Republican (now MAGA) party’s penchant for putting private company profits above fixing the problem. Taking care of billionaires is much more important to MAGAs than taking care of the average citizen.

Keep that in mind when you vote next year. 

Wednesday Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds along with a group of MAGA governors sent a letter to the White House protesting a new rule for nursing homes to have a registered nurse on staff 24 hours a day. Also in the new rules were requirements that ensure residents a minimum number of hours of daily care.  

While the governors claim that they were protesting overreach by the federal government, I would submit that once again the MAGA politicians were much more concerned about keeping profits high and costs low for yet one more piece of America’s horribly splintered privatized healthcare system.

Brother, does America’s healthcare system need a complete overhaul with service to the citizen as its core focus.