A Medicare Advantage Plan For All
The U.S. has suffered over 1,000,000 deaths from Covid. Alarm bells still go off with every new variant in the U.S. It is obvious that if the American people were in better shape, the landscape for fighting this illness and it’s impact on our health care system would be very different. We certainly would have experienced far fewer Covid deaths if we were in better health, but we have not exactly quantified the number of excess deaths.
Our vision is to create a Medicare Advantage (For All) Plan that rewards the American people for becoming healthier and refocuses the health insurance industry toward promoting a more virus resistant health status. This will increase longevity from Covid and other chronic illness conditions and save a lot of money. Many physicians are actively expressing their concerns about our proposal in various forums , including JAMA and PNHP. Often these opposing arguments are actually supportive of things like the feasibility of such a program and it’s potential popularity and cost effectiveness. Also, Steve Forbes, former candidate for President, adopted the program as a potential answer to our need for universal coverage. You can find his arguments and those of Dr. Oz, Republican candidate for the Senate, at: https://www.forbes.com/…/medicare-advantage-for-all…/? Also, Avik Roy, a policy editor @ Forbes has created another web site devoted to the cause at: https://freopp.org/medicare-advantage-for-all-ace74a1cb3bb. Medicare Advantage For All is an idea who’s time has come. A properly structured Medicare-Advantage-For-All plan will save Billions of dollars, reduce chronic illness and improve our economic productivity.
We must bring Republican and Democrat politicians together with hospitals and doctors in a collective effort to solve these obvious and debilitating problems that are KILLING the American people. The principal cause of the high cost and quality is incentives! Medicare Advantage plans (MA) for seniors have demonstrated that value-based health care improves quality and lowers the cost. And, MA plans have saved the federal government Billions of Dollars over traditional Medicare since its inception. According to Modern Healthcare, ” The trend toward lower utilization among MA compared to Medicare has been well documented in scientific literature, with estimates ranging from 10% to 60%. A 2019 Study that appears on the NIH web site by the American Economics Journal: Applied Economics found Medicare Advantage spending to be 30% lower than traditional Medicare per beneficiary per month.” If the federal government would just extend a well-designed hybrid of Medicare Advantage to All Americans, as the ACA Public Option, the solution to most of our health care problems in the United States would be in sight.
Accept the fact that we cannot keep doing the same thing and expect a different result. What we have done with Obamacare, over the last ten years, is throw money at these problems. It has taken over ten years and Billions of dollars just to get approximately 11 Million Americans covered. And, in that same time frame Medicare Advantage has enrolled over twice as many senior Americans. These programs have different dynamics but paying more money to increase eligibility for the ACA will not directly addresses the high cost of health care and the deplorable health condition of the American people. When we are willing to face the fact that the outcomes of this health care system, including Obamacare, are broken, and agree to stop throwing money at it, maybe we can start to implement some real long-term solutions.
Compromise is required. The end result has to be a significant improvement in the health level of the American people. Over 500,000 Covid deaths resulted directly from underlying chronic health conditions. Ninety (90%) of our annual 3.7 Trillion Dollar health care bill is spent on the treating these very same chronic illnesses. If we are going to stop this carnage, we need to come together on solutions that we all know will work. It is fair to say that our private health care economic interest is more on filling the hospital beds than in trying to keep patients out of the hospital altogether. Unfortunately, this economic interest drives our political policy. Human behavior seeks survival of the fittest. And, if we are willing to change the dynamics and that survival depends upon how well our health care system keeps Americans healthy and out of the hospital, we will be successful in keeping Americans healthy. We have learned how to do this with our seniors in the Medicare Advantage programs. And, if we can muster the political will, and unite around the very evident need to improve the health of our citizens, we can translate MA’s success to Obamacare and other programs. Creating a Public Option that incorporates the MA and Wellness incentives that we know have been successful in keeping patients healthy and reducing the cost of their health care, is the answer.
Even though we spend much more money than any other country in the world, our birth rate and our life expectancies are falling. Ninety-Four percent (94%) of the the Corona virus deaths were caused by unrelated chronic health conditions. Some preliminary COVID fatality rates from underlying medical conditions include cardiovascular disease at 10.5%, Diabetes 7.3%, COPD 6.3% and Hypertension 6.0%. On August 26, 2020, the CDC updated a detailed breakdown of deaths unaccompanied by other health conditions. Americans with No underlying conditions accounted for only six percent (6%) of the total COVID deaths. The failure of our health care system and our ill health are what’s really killing us! Our babies are dying at a rate that is 71% higher than comparable countries. Our maternal death rate is the WORST of all the developed nations in the world. Americans between ages 24 and 64, of every income, race, and ethnic background have shorter life spans. We have sunk to the thirty-fifth (35) rank of other nations in the world.
The Medicare-Advantage-For-All program was endorsed as the answer to our health insurance crisis by former Presidential Candidate Steve Forbes, Dr. Stuart Butler of the Brookings Institution, Dr. Oz and the former CEO of Kaiser Permanente, George Halvorson. Also, JAMA published an endorsement article by Dr. Stuart M. Butler, Senior Fellow the Brookings Institution and former Director of the Center for Innovation at the Heritage Foundation. Kamala Harris also promoted a Medicare Advantage For All program early on in her campaign for President. Under the Biden/ Harris Administration, the Medicare-Advantage-For-All (MAA) program can answer our need for cost effective affordable health care.
We know Medicare Advantage works. We know how to manage it. The same intermediary carriers handle both Obamacare and Medicare Advantage. We don’t need to re-invent the wheel. What we need to do is come up with compromise legislation that adds a Public Option to Obamacare with sophisticated capitation reimbursement systems, and state of the art value-based quality management practice patterns and innovative patient incentives that maximize the effectiveness of medical treatments, reduce cost, improve the health of the American people and create more affordable and transformative service delivery in all our programs. The Public Option can be the vehicle for making all of that possible.
Covid dramatized that the most important priority for the health of Americans is to build up our immune systems. Today, sixty-six percent (66%) of Americans are overweight. Americans led almost all of the developed countries in the incidence of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes and we have the concomitant death rates to match. If these trends continue, T.H. Chan School of Public Health predicts that 50% of all Americans will be obese by 2030, at just the time when we double the number of our citizens qualifying for Medicare. This is our EHEALTH CARE PERFECT STORM. This is a crisis, but as we have learned from COVID, we are not very good at recognizing or dealing with health crisis, even life-threatening crisis. The Democrats and Biden proposals to Build Back Better American Health, is to increase subsidies to the current Obamacare programs to allow more people to qualify, lower the age for Medicare and to find a federal work-around to expand Medicaid in every state. There are no solutions to improve our health or lower the skyrocketing costs of the ACA, Medicaid or traditional Medicare programs. Throwing money at the problem is favored by everybody, including the BlueCross BlueShield Association, the Association of Health Insurance Plans, the American Hospital Association and the American Medical Association. It a safe solution for everybody that stands to benefit directly from it, except the American people, who are dying every day from our collective inability to address the causes of our ill health. Throwing money at our health care problems is what we have been doing and look where it has gotten us! Consider that collectively we spent $3.65 Trillion on health care in 2018. And, before COVID-19, the CBO projected that our health costs would increase by 5.5% per year over the next ten years. In 2022, a new study predicts a 6.5% increase in health care costs due to sicker patients seeking care that was delayed due to the pandemic. The Medicare Trust Fund, covering 58.7 Million seniors would have been bankrupt in 2026, except Trump suspended the payroll taxes and put the program on the general ledger. We desperately need to reform Medicare and hence the robust advertising push to get people into traditional Medicare Advantage plans.
It’s time that “We The People” tell Congress exactly how to fix our health care system that works. YOU. can join us This web site shows you how together, we can lower the high cost of health care by improving the health of the American people and making our health insurance more affordable. THERE IS NOTHING MORE IMPORTANT THAN YOUR HEALTH! We must get all of our elected officials to accept our extraordinary healthcare system and give us the “Better” health and the “Better” health insurance that we deserve! Please read more…
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