Hardly a week goes by but what I read something critical of Medicare Advantage (MA) plans. MA plans have become somewhat politicized with Democrats preferring government-run (traditional) Medicare, while Republicans like the idea of competition among private plans. Here is the thing that critics forget: MA plans are popular with seniors. They are growing and now cover more than half of all people enrolled in Medicare, about 31 million seniors and disabled individuals.
Category: Medicare
Saturday Links
- What the left and right are coming to agree on: Obamacare is encouraging consolidation and that is bad for patients.
- New study: If you count all welfare spending as income in kind to poor families, the real poverty rate is only 1.6%.
- FDA: A treatment for cancer may cause cancer.
- Avalere study: For patients in traditional Medicare use of skilled nursing homes was 12% higher and hospital inpatient care was 37% higher than for Medicare Advantage patients.
If all Medicare beneficiaries were in Medicare Advantage, the hospital trust fund would remain solvent until 2048.
Monday Links
- AI is better than Dear Abby. HT: Tyler
- Commonwealth Fund: having insurance doesn’t mean health care is affordable. Missing: the observation that Obamacare has made the problem worse.
- The meaning of the Cigna settlement with the government: Medicare Advantage plans should be held accountable for submitting accurate risk adjustment data.
- Which is better: for-profit or nonprofit? All the evidence, much of which Effective Altruists helped to compile, shows that nonprofits are much more likely to be fraudulent, or to simply fail to achieve their goals.
- Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky makes two claims: one possibly true (there is no free will) and one very wrong (it is unfair to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior). The first claim is irrelevant because we experience the world as though we have free will, and we have no alternative to that. And, the reason to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior is the utilitarian desire to get more of the former and less of the latter.
- [This is also an example of the fallacy of the stolen concept. If you claim there is no good or bad behavior because there is no free will, you can’t turn around and use ethics to condemn the rewarding and the punishing.]
Monday Links
- How do PBMs make their money?
- After a woman dies of cancer she posthumously offers to buy up the medical debts of other patients.
- Scientists edit genes to control cholesterol.
- Gene editing can also prevent sickle cell, but Medicaid won’t pay for it. The Biden administration is partly to blame. (WSJ)
- Patients wait 13 hours for free health care.