It is time to challenge the very existence of the Medicare Advantage scam, not have CMS keep trying to fix it.
The CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid) has run a failed 20-year "Medicare Advantage" experiment increasingly enriching for-profit health insurance corporations (UHC stock: 12 cents in 1984, $553 in Nov 2023). This experiment has annually wasted billions of American taxpayer dollars and has cost additional billions of taxpayer dollars to investigate associated Medicare Advantage FRAUD.
In addition, CMS oversees Medicare Supplemental Plans A-N that requires a costly bureaucracy (also using taxpayer dollars) to monitor these plans administered by private for-profit health insurance companies. And each year CMS mails a large heavy instruction booklet to Seniors on Medicare.
Millions of American Seniors on Medicare get tricked by, are angered by and often end up in bankruptcy by this massive Medicare Advantage scheme. It is time to save those billions of taxpayer dollars and instead apply a much lesser amount of taxpayer dollars to a streamlined "Medicare for All Seniors" program as follows:
=> Provide the equivalent of the discontinued Medicare Plan F (see chart abcmedicarehelp.com/...) and enhance it with hearing, vision and dental for ALL seniors currently on Parts A & B - and provide this with no co-pays or deductibles and subsidized for lower-income seniors based upon their annual income. The billions of taxpayer dollars saved would surely be more than enough to provide the old “Plan F” plus vision, dental and hearing and a subsidy for every lower-income senior – while saving still more billions of taxpayer dollars.
=> Seniors would be enrolled one time at age 65 – and have the same comprehensive plan for life – no need each year to select the plan that is “right” for them or be bombarded with constant advertising and intrusive phone calls. This is especially important since older recipients often experience loss of cognitive ability and energy to analyze health plan options. Seniors would simply receive the care they need and ignore the benefits they don’t need (like one big buffet table - “enhanced” Plan F).
=> Medicare Advantage would disappear (saving billions of taxpayer dollars that the for-profit health insurance companies misuse - beyond medical expenses - to pay millions in annual compensation to their CEOs, pay staff to often delay or deny care, pay shareholders, pay for endless intrusive advertising, pay lobbyists, etc). Cigna's CEO, David Cordani, received $20.9 million in total compensation in 2022 - thanks to Medicare Advantage taxpayer dollars from CMS. For-profit health insurers provide no product or honest service in exchange for the billions of taxpayer dollars they receive from CMS.
=> Medicare Advantage Fraud would therefore disappear (saving billions of taxpayer dollars - $0 fraud by MA if MA no longer exists)
=> Medicare Supplemental Plans A-N would also disappear (saving billions of taxpayer dollars)
=> The monthly deduction from Social Security is not equitable (deducted from some but not all Seniors on Social Security) and should be eliminated. An example is the $174.70 deducted each month from our Social Security whether one nets $1,493 or $3,156 per month.
=> Let’s be open to achieving “Medicare for All Seniors” as we continue to work toward “Medicare for All”. We all would have liked insulin to be $35/month for everyone but for now it’s only $35/month for Medicare recipients. And that has had some effect upon lowering it for others by some of the insulin manufacturers.
=> Repeatedly alerting the general public to the billions of dollars saved with “Medicare for All Seniors” would make it more difficult for members of Congress to continue threatening the Medicare Program as too costly and needing to be cut. (As of March 2023: 65,748,297 people were enrolled in Medicare, an increase of almost 100,000 since the last report in September of 2022.)
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