I have a family member with a Medicare Advantage plan and am very well aware of how it works. Compared to what I know about basic Medicare, I think advantage is an accurate description. When I read that President Obama believes these plans are helpful only to the insurance companies, I have to disagree.
Disagreed so much I wrote an article about it which has been published several places, including here.
I find it interesting and sometimes amusing that some Americans don’t want government managed care then turn around and fight against attempts to undermine their medicaid and medicare benefits! I don’t get it!
Congrats on enjoying the Advantage. I don’t know much abou it though. My father is enrolled in Kaiser, the little I know about which makes me mad at every turn. Imagine a bureaucratic nightmare that an ailing senior must navigate on his own, one which has gatekeepers at every corner are incented with keeping people away, and you get the picture. This is the future of US healthcare if Obama has his way.
I’ll tell you a wonderful system here in Denver, Total Longtern Care. They pick up the seniors by van in the morning, treat their medical conditions, feed them lunch, and bring them home. TLC is part of the Pace program, and I hear there are similar organizations in every state. The only sad thing is that this program is limited to those who are destitute. If only this were the standard by which all senior care was based.
My grandparents use medicare, medicare advantage, and then two supplemental insurance programs ontop of it, and still get huge bills now and then. (Expensive non-fatal medical conditions seem to run in the family!).
FOUR instances of basically the same thing, slightly different at the same time seems incredibly inefficient.