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The Medicare Advantage (MA) programs insure over twenty-two (22) Million Americans with comprehensive health insurance, at a lower federal cost than either Traditional Medicare or Obamacare/ACA. The progressive “Medicare for All” plan has a growing popularity among the American electorate. House Democrats made improved health care a successful plank in their 2018 congressional campaigns – but what we need to see is more practicality devoted to achieving this goal.

The affordability of health insurance is the last, and most important piece of our truly great American health care system puzzle that we need to complete. The Democrats call for “Medicare for All” is an understandable expression of our collective desire to successfully complete this work of art. In an Amerispeak poll conducted last year, 49% of Americans were very concerned about the number of people without health insurance.

The failure of the Republican Party to come up with a viable alternative to the ACA and the fact that we still have 30 million uninsured Americans has exacerbated this national crisis and thwarted the efforts of our health insurance carriers and health care providers to extend their services to all Americans.

We need to see more practicality and creativity devoted to achieving a solution to this problem. The Mercatus Center at Georgetown University has released a comprehensive study showing that Senator Sander’s “Medicare for All” Bill would cost $32.6 trillion over the first 10 years. Our country currently has a national debt of approximately $21.7 trillion. Based on these numbers, conservatives will probably be successful in opposing “Medicare for All” so long as Republicans maintain a majority in Senate.

What we can do to fix this system is deregulate the non-group health insurance market and crank up a variety of Gold, Silver, and Bronze – Medicare Advantage (MA) health insurance plan choices that will be attractive to and more affordable for young and middle-aged Americans. As we all know, MA is a tremendously successful program. It already covers over 38% of our elderly citizens. Moreover, some of the special Medicare and Medicaid plans may also cover the costs of an assisted living facility for a few months. A few other senior services can also be covered by such healthcare plans.

Not to forget, Medicare Advantage is growing like a weed. Of the 11,000 – 15,000 Americans that age into eligibility for the Medicare program daily; the Gorham Group believes that 50% choose MA plans within their first year of eligibility. It does not take a rocket scientist to see the MA is far more successful than Obamacare (9 Million) will ever be. ACA enrollment has declined in each of the last three years. And, even as we currently enjoy almost the lowest uninsured rate ever in U.S. history, the ACA is steadily moving us in the wrong direction. We can make these Medicare Advantage plans even more affordable by preserving the competition between the health plans.

Necessary subsidies and tax credits can be funded by restructuring the Medicare Trust Funds, which must be done shortly because the Medicare Trust Fund actuaries predict it will be bankrupt by 2026. This year they will issue the second “Medicare Funding Warning” that within 7 years, Medicare will have to draw more than 45% of its funding from general revenues. For each such “Warning” by law, requires the President of the United States to submit to the U.S. Congress proposed legislation responsive to the problem “within 15 days after the submission of the Fiscal 2020 Budget.” Congress is then required to consider the legislation on an expedited basis. This law is a measure of the importance we place on protecting our Medicare program.

Long story short, it should be clear that it is within our power to reduce our cost of health care. We have the skill and expertise to simultaneously reduce the cost of our health care GDP to a competitive world market level, secure our exceptional and unique health care financing system and improve the health, productivity and insurability of the American people. A properly designed, expertly administered and adequately regulated MAA program will accomplish these goals.

Want to support MA? You can.

To support and join this movement, you can download our Medicare Advantage Membership Application and complete it with your contact information and send it to us with your financial support or just complete the Pay Pal Credit card authorization on the About and Become A Supporter Pages on our web site.

For more information on the Medicare-Advantage-For-All plan and the movement, visit our Medicare-Advantage-For-All plan page or our Medicare Advantage Facebook page, call us at 1-888-683-3719 or contact our email us at: contact@medicare-advantage-for-all.com.

 

 

We know it can be hard to imagine that there’s something out there right now that can fix our healthcare system…but there is. It’s called Medicare Advantage.  Healthcare should not be about greed and profit-driven health insurance corporations. A national health care plan should be about health care. We had hoped Obamacare would fix the system, but it actually broke the system because of the way tasks were handled, and 30 million Americans are still without health insurance.

Now with Medicare-Advantage, we have an opportunity to do healthcare right this time.

The failure of Obamacare has taught us how to successfully approach the market.

A properly structured business model incentivizes health insurance companies to maintain and improve the health of the American people, as is the case with the Medicare Advantage programs. A properly structured health insurance program that pays carriers a capitation fee, so that the healthier their population gets, the more money they make, helps both them and the American people they serve. Demonizing the industry, especially the not-for-profits (that are helping) and trying to replace them all, is ludicrous.

The reason we have 30 Million Americans without health insurance is largely because they can’t afford the health insurance and we cannot expect the taxpayers to buy it for them. As you know, as a result of the fact that health care is so expensive, the Medicare Trust Fund is just about to run out of money. The real reason the Medicare Trust Fund is running out of money is NOT because of greedy insurance carriers or overpaid health care professionals. A huge contributing factor is that the health condition is of the American people is so Deplorable! Our health status is the main reason that our health care costs are going through the roof.

As Warren Buffet has implied that when the government takes over, it makes matters worse – that is exactly where we are with health insurance today in the United States.

Our proposal for “Medicare-Advantage-For-All plan is all about health care and it is all about the health of the American people – that is what this debate should be about!

The traditional Medicare program is NOT affordable, partly because of the deplorable health condition of the American people and partly because our health care system is not structured properly to improve our health.

The biggest reason Medicare for All (M4A) can’t fix the system is the cost. M4A is trying to take on too much. We have a Medicare Trust Fund for 59 million Americans seniors that will be 100% gone by 2026.

We want to extend a “Medicare” program to everyone just as much as our sensible and sincere politicians want to do, but we sincerely believe we have found the “best” way to do it.

If we are going to improve the health of the American people and successfully reduce the cost of health care, we must commit ourselves, as a nation to achieving the lowest National Health Care GDP of any industrialized nation on this planet. In order to do that, we have to change the architecture of our health insurance plans. We need to gear this new architecture toward improving the way we interact with the health plans as insureds and the way the medical profession treats our disease in the United States. Medicare for All will NOT do any of these important, in fact critical things, unless we have the political will to re-design Medicare with the Apollo style Medicare Advantage plan.

Obviously, we need to try something new. In doing so, we should rely upon the programs that are affordable, like Medicare Advantage! Medicare Advantage is ALREADY working for over 22 Million Americans and extending the program to everybody should be a no brainer and our highest national priority.

For more information on the Medicare-Advantage-For-All plan and the movement, visit our Medicare-Advantage-For-All plan page, call us at 1-888-683-3719 or contact our email us at: contact@medicare-advantage-for-all.com.

To support and join this movement, you can download our Membership Application and complete it with your contact information and send it to us with your financial support or just complete the Pay Pal Credit card authorization on the About and Become A Supporter Pages on our web site.

 

Medicare-Advantage-For-All plans (MAA) can deliver an American health care system capable of achieving affordable and accessible health care for every American. Medicare-Advantage-For-All will be designed to attract the young and middle-aged Americans that have not been able to take advantage of Obamacare. We envision these plans to be offered right along-side the ACA/Obamacare plans, which currently only cover 8.4 Million participants. All residents of the U.S., who are not eligible for (or covered by) other health insurance, will be able to participate in these new MAA plans. The MAA Plans should be especially attractive to students, low wage workers, and all the other people who comprise the 30 Million uninsured Americans, who cannot afford to buy ACA health insurance.

This sounds great, right? But, how will this be funded/paid for?

Medicare-Advantage-For-All will be funded just like Obamacare; however, unlike Obamacare, MAA will generate significant savings in the overall expenditure of health care paid by the federal and state government and the American people and our domestic businesses.

We envision a two stages process, something like an Apollo rocket. The first stage is the extension of a Defined Contribution Plans, like most large American employers use, to create access to medical care for the American people that don’t already have health insurance. The second stage would be the introduction of a revolutionary next-generation Medicare Advantage plan we are calling “Apollo” after the successful space program.

The first stage program will initially be financed similarly to the Obamacare/Affordable Care Act (ACA). Government subsidies will be provided to those American citizens that meet specific income guidelines. There will be income levels, above which the cash subsidies will be made phase into tax credits received by the participants at the time their taxes are paid. Anyone above certain upper-income levels that should be able to afford a reasonably priced health insurance plan would pay premiums for the programs without any government assistance on a sliding scale. No one will be required to participate.

Overall, the programs will be less expensive by design. But to start, like all the new federal health plans in the past, we expect some over subsidization and underpricing of the programs, as was the case with both Medicare and Obamacare. After the first two years though, costs should stabilize, as they did with the ACA. If we are successful with the integral health and wellness programs, the positive effects of the program will gradually lower the actual cost of health care. This will take a few years, but all the benefit plans will start out being less costly than Obamacare Qualified Plans for several reasons:

• First, they will be engineered by insurance experts using all the latest information. These modern programs will not be subject to unnecessary federal regulations that force health insurance companies to offer benefits that people don’t need.
• Second, the Department of Health and Human (HHS) services would cooperate with the carriers to work out constructive capitation reimbursement schemes that effectively shift the risk from the federal government to the carriers. This will require them to assume full responsibility for the health and well-being of their members. In addition, HHS will appropriately participate in favorable provider cost negotiations to make the first-generation product as cost-effective as possible.
• Third, adverse selection will be minimized. The old-world provisions of waiting periods for certain benefits will be allowed for premium health products. All pre-existing conditions will be accepted and covered immediately, but not necessarily by all plans. Some Pre-X programs will be paid for like Medicaid, financed on more of a cost-plus basis with shared responsibility between the federal and state governments wherever possible. Nothing suggested here will preclude Block-Grant funding.

The first stage programs will be common sense Defined Contribution health insurance contracts, like those commonly used by most large employer groups with integral employee wellness initiatives. We believe the second stage Defined Contribution plans will be much more revolutionary. They will reward the participants for improving their health condition. Premium credits and increased benefit levels will be given to reward participants for specific healthy behaviors. People will be rewarded for maintaining and improving their health, and these people will not be required to pay more for Americans, who are fully capable, but either cannot or will not take care of themselves. No one will be left out in these programs, and no one will be disadvantaged. However, those people who can maintain a healthy lifestyle but for whatever reason do not choose to do so will have to pay a little more for that their health insurance. This is only fair and reasonable, considering that they are more likely to make use of their health plans. This second stage program is going to require some creative financing because traditionally we have financed health care by charging the healthiest people among us more than we should, in order to pay for the unhealthiest among us. This was the impetus for the Obamacare Individual Tax Mandate, which was repealed. We have to start rewarding the correct behaviors rather than condoning the incorrect behaviors. As Warren Buffet says, “We can not continue to do the wrong thing indefinitely.”

Every participant in Medicare-Advantage-For-All will be underwritten as an individual with full consideration of their specific health condition. Each person’s rates will be directly associated with his/her health condition and changes in that condition, like car insurance. If you have a lot of car accidents or speeding tickets, you are going to pay more than someone who never had a traffic ticket and never had an accident. This is just common sense, but we don’t use common sense when it comes to health insurance. Some of our politicians want to remove all personal responsibility when it comes to a person’s health condition in favor of government responsibility. That isn’t how it works in the real world.

The new Defined Contribution Apollo Medicare Advantage contracts will require special underwriting. The traditional underwriting for these programs will have to be substantially restructured to allow individual participants to pay vastly different rates for essentially the same benefit programs based on their health condition. Some plans may wish to allow beneficiaries to enroll for two- and three-year periods. These longer-term contracts would have stronger economic incentives for both the carriers and the beneficiaries to promote wellness and preventative care. The ability for our medical practitioner to initiate, reinforce, support, and monitor their patients will be properly rewarded and supported by their reimbursements under this new Apollo type plan.

Our Medicare-Advantage-For-All plans should be able to reduce the risk and consequently, the expense of chronic illness by about 50% in the first two years. These savings would amount to more than $1.3 Trillion annually and reduce the NHC-GDP by 6% percent to approximately $2.35 Trillion Dollars, or 12% of Total GDP to start.

This target population for this plan is primarily the 30 Million uninsured Americans plus the 8.4 Million Obamacare subscribers, about 75% of which receive federal subsidies in order to make the ACA programs affordable.  Medicare-Advantage-For-All is not looking to replace Obamacare. What we want to do is create a program that the America people can afford to choose. A program that will give Americans a choice that will attract most of the uninsured Americans that Obamacare has failed to attract.

If we are successful with an affordable, comprehensive insurance plan with an integral health and wellness component, other health plans will quickly incorporate these features into their programs. Eventually, everyone, except perhaps fee-for-service Medicare and collective bargaining agreements, will have state-of-the-art health and wellness programs that will lower everybody’s rates and improve the general health of most Americans.

If we do this right, the federal government will be able to reward the health plans, as they do now under the STAR program, with more federal money based on their ability to improve outcomes, improve health status and reduce the overall cost. If we get the incentives right, everybody wins. The effect of this reduction will lower the cost of health care and health insurance for individuals and businesses and will increase our health condition, our productivity, and our competitiveness as a nation. We firmly believe that in order for the United States to remain a competitor in world markets with the greatest health care system on the planet earth, we need to commit ourselves as a nation to achieve the lowest national health care GDP of all the high-income developed nations by the year 2030! If we can return man to the moon, and plant an American flag on Mars, we can certainly achieve the “best” health of any industrialized nation on the planet.

For all these reasons listed, this is how we will pay for Medicare-Advantage-For-All.

Want to become a supporter of the Medicare-Advantage-For-All plan and movement? Here’s how: You can visit our “About” or “Become A Supporter” Pages and PayPal, or download our Membership Application and complete it with your contact information and send it to us with your financial support. In return, we will keep you up to date on the issues and send you our signature publication “The True American,” which is designed to influence and educate the political world to our cause. We welcome any level of taxable financial support (non-tax deductible).

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For more information on our membership and Medicare-Advantage-For-All movement, visit our Medicare-Advantage-For-All web site, call us at 1-888-683-3719 or email us at contact@medicare-advantage-for-all.com.