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Medicare Advantage vs. the Romney-Ryan plan
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| Contributor | RP |
| Last Edited | RP Aug 17, 2012 03:10pm |
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| Category | Analysis |
| Author | Mark Murray |
| News Date | Thursday, August 16, 2012 10:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney now says that his plan to transform Medicare is pretty much the same as Medicare Advantage.
Medicare Advantage is an alternative to Medicare, whereby seniors get their health-care benefits through private plans instead of the government. As the Washington Post reported in 2009, these plans tend to offer extra services like free gym memberships, free hearing aids, or even free blood-pressure machines.
But the reason why the program saw cuts in the 2010 health-care law is due to its shortcoming: It's not as cost-efficient as traditional Medicare.
Under Medicare Advantage, the Kaiser Family Foundation says, Medicare ends up paying the private plans MORE per enrollee -- about 7% more -- than the fee-for-service program does.
"It's a wasteful, inefficient program and always has been," Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) told the Washington Post in 2009. It's "stuffing money into the pockets of private insurers, and it doesn't provide any better benefits to anybody." |
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