Cut; don’t cut, keep what you have, but it is changing, forget what I said in that townhall meeting

A recent Wall Street Journal article relates the status of Medicare Advantage Plans, you know those plans in which eleven million Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled and will be allowed to keep under health care reform. 

Well, even before we get to reform, premiums are going up 25%, 400 plans are being dropped and seniors out of pocket costs are rising or going down depending on your plan and point of view. To CMS’s way of thinking requiring a plan to lower cost-sharing is a benefit, that is if the premiums don’t go up to do so. 

These rising costs and disappearing plans are before health care reform cuts an additional $100 billion to help pay for expanding coverage for others.   

Under Medicare doctors are paid too little (which must be the case since Congress wants to block fee reductions) and alternative plans are paid too much (amounts previously determined by the government) and yet Medicare is our model of a well run public option. 

If you were a senior somewhere in America and you are in a plan that allows you much lower out of pocket costs than standard Medicare and you now are told, that plan will not be available in 2010, or your premiums are going up 25% or you will now have premiums when non-existed, what would you think?  CanI trust these guys?

Clearly, we want the government to be efficient and not to over pay for anything, but where have they been all the time these overpayments were accumulating? Why does Congress block cuts to physician fees year after year, if it did not mean it when the legislation was enacted?  Why are payments to some plans too high and yet Congress seeks to block scheduled premium increases for standard Medicare when those premiumns are too low?

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