Medicare Advantage may be a scam

By Ellen Kaczmarek, M.D.
Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times, November 16, 2022

Thanks to an Oct. 9 New York Times article, attention has been drawn to the Medicare Advantage (MA) scam and we are better informed about where our Medicare dollars go.

We have seen how MA insurers persuade otherwise intelligent seniors to sign up by offering freebies like gym memberships, zero premiums and discounts on hearing aids, eyeglasses and dental care. We all know there is no free lunch, and it’s now obvious that this swag is paid for by bilking taxpayer-funded Medicare into giving the for-profit MA companies much more than they need to provide health care while they restrict access to many out-of-network doctors and hospitals. Those insurance companies make you look “sicker” on paper by a process called “upcoding” to have Medicare pay them more for your medical care (which you don’t get). The insurers keep what is not spent on your care.

And now there’s a new threat to the entire Medicare program, created in the last months of the Trump administration. Initially called Direct Contracting but renamed REACH (Realizing Equity, Access, and Community Health), this insidious program aims to completely privatize Medicare by 2030.

Wall Street investors are excited by the prospect of profits approaching 30 percent, which can come only by further cheating the government and withholding needed health care from seniors. The program encourages insurers to grow their volume by allowing them to sign up seniors without their permission. The only way seniors can exit the program is by changing primary care physicians, which most are extremely reluctant to do.

The REACH program requires no further Congressional approval. The only way to stop it is pressure from the Medicare recipients. Find out more at ProtectMedicare.net. Call the White House directly to demand an end to the REACH money-grab from the Medicare fund.

full article:
https://pnhp.org…