If and when she'll ever collect it isn't clear, but that hardly matters except on the question of whether or not she could be prosecuted. It makes no difference for the Medicare budget, for Medicare beneficiaries who will be coaxed into "Medicare Advantage" plans, nor for the primary care doctors who will be squeezed financially if they don't sign up with those plans. http://www.pnhp.org/...
[Disclosure: That includes me as a primary care doctor, and perhaps as a Medicare beneficiary next year. But I only practice primary care part time. My income doing drug studies probably subsidizes my primary care practice.]
I first saw anything about this in an eMail newsletter from Physicians for a National Healthcare Program (PNHP) last Thursday (April 25). I see it was diaried April 12 by divineorder http://www.dailykos.com/...
and here
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://itsoureconomy.us/...
It may have been mentioned other places I missed also. But nobody else seems to have connected the dots in a way that points toward the Secretary of Health and Human Services and written a purposely inflammatory headline.
Physicians group decries 'backroom Medicare giveaway'
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, April 9, 2013
Contact: Mark Almberg, (312) 782-6006, mark@pnhp.org
Medicare's costs will jump by $7.43 billion next year – the equivalent of $149 for each of the nearly 50 million beneficiaries in the program – due to an unprecedented intervention last week by the Obama administration in the way privately run, for-profit Medicare Advantage (MA) plans, which are also known as Medicare HMOs, are paid by the government, a national physicians group reported today.
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"Medicare Advantage plans have been overpaid by the federal government for years, wasting tens of billions of taxpayer dollars," said Dr. David Himmelstein, professor at the City University of New York School of Public Health and co-founder of the physicians group. "Studies by the Government Accountability Office, MedPAC and many private groups have drawn attention to this overpayment. The Obama administration's ACA acknowledged the overpayments by calling for cuts to these payments starting in 2014.
"But last week's extraordinary rate-setting directive from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, in which she spurned historical practice and the advice of the CMS Office of the Actuary, will result in an obscene windfall to the private, for-profit insurers," he said. "Simultaneously, this backroom Medicare giveaway is a heavy blow to taxpayers and the traditional, public Medicare program."[Emphasis added]
The article goes on to track how the stocks of Cigna, Humana, UnitedHealthGroup, Aetna, and WellPoint soared in the week after this announcement, to the tune of $13.2 billion. I don't think my headline is an exaggeration. Secretary Sebelius isn't going to get checks from Cigna or Humana any time soon. But I'll take bets that she goes to work for some such company after she goes through the revolving door back to the private sector, after some "decent interval" that her lawyers tell her is enough to nullify the idea of a quid pro quo. What's the commission on $13.2 billion? If they give her a sinecure job worth 13.2 million, that's a tenth of one percent.