By Sam Baker
Axios Vitals, October 24, 2017
Keep this on your radar: My colleague Bob Herman reports Devoted Health, a new insurance company that will only sell Medicare Advantage plans, just raised $62 million, according a new financial disclosure. The startup will start selling Medicare Advantage plans in 2019.
The players: Some big names are backing Devoted Health: Former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist are on the board. Todd and Ed Park, brothers who both worked at electronic health record and billing company athenahealth, are the co-founders; they also recruited Venrock’s Bob Kocher as chief medical officer.
Get smart: Medicare Advantage is where the big money is. The ACA marketplaces grab a lot of headlines, but they are a blip on the radar when compared with the hundreds of billions of dollars tied up in private Medicare plans and care for seniors.
https://www.axios.com…
Devoted Health:
https://devoted.com…
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Comment:
By Don McCanne, M.D.
“Medicare Advantage is where the big money is,” and Former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist are going for it. Our trusted public servants have led us down the path of privatization of Medicare by way of the private, for-profit Medicare Advantage plans. Now that they have left government, the payoff awaits them.
When we could have a vastly superior publicly-financed and publicly-administered improved Medicare for all, why do we continue to tolerate this? Satisfying the greed of the few takes precedence over ensuring the health of all of us? Where are our values in all of this?
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