We can’t control what others do and we can’t stop misfortune from striking. But we can control our own actions. Those who are financially prudent will most likely enjoy success, even if events don’t always go their way.
If MA is valid it doesn’t need extra subsidies from Medicare. If this is fixed, MA will be less desirable with higher premiums or lower benefits.
The average American senior’s Medicare premiums last year were about 10% higher, or more than $200 annually, because of alleged overpayments to private Medicare Advantage plans, congressional investigators found.
Medicare Part B premiums that most seniors pay were partly pushed up by controversial health-insurer practices such as adding diagnoses to trigger higher payments, according to the Joint Economic Committee, a bipartisan group of lawmakers that advises Congress on financial matters.
Overpayments to Medicare Advantage insurers increased Part B premiums by $13.4 billion in 2025, the committee said, a cost mostly borne by seniors. Both those enrolled in Medical Advantage plans and those in standard Medicare faced those additional costs.
The committee published the report Tuesday, after The Wall Street Journal was first to report its findings. The committee’s Republican majority staff prepared the report.
A spokesman for AHIP, the health-insurance industry trade group, said the committee’s findings were based on “fundamentally flawed data, methodology and extrapolations” and shouldn’t dictate policy.
Excerpt from:
Seniors Paid Billions in Extra Premiums Due to Alleged Medicare Overpayments
A congressional committee finds that controversial practices like adding diagnoses in Medicare Advantage triggered higher bills
MA provides a bundled plan that combines both Part A and B coverage, as well as supplemental benefits that are not offered in the traditional Medicare (TM) program. The original intention of MA was for payments to equal 95percent of TM. If successful, this would create a sharing structure whereby privately provided Medicare plans compete and produce savings that would be shared between taxpayers, beneficiaries would benefit from more choice and lower premiums, and efficient insurers would be rewarded.
However, the same design features which promised taxpayers and TM beneficiaries a share of savings also work in reverse. If realized payments to MA are instead higher than what they would be for covering beneficiaries in TM, then this would increase the cost to taxpayers, as well as Part B premiums for both MA and TM beneficiaries.
MA has achieved many valuable successes and now covers about 55 percent of Medicare enrollees, a share projected to keep rising. However, MA has not achieved the envisioned savings of costs equaling 95 percent of Traditional Medicare.
Instead, the official estimate by the non-partisan Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) found that MA would be paid $84 billion more in 2025 than it would have cost to cover the same beneficiaries in TM, or an average of 120 percent of the cost of TM
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