Health Systems Ditching Medicare Advantage: Guess Who Wins?
Newsweek reports several health systems are dropping Medicare Advantage plans, citing low reimbursement rates (Newsweek, January 2024). This leaves seniors scrambling, but the article frames it as a market 'correction,' not a systemic failure. What it doesn't mention is how politicians, bought and paid for by the private insurance industry, systematically undermined traditional Medicare for
decades. While Newsweek ponders the woes of private insurers, they gloss over the fact that Medicare Advantage plans drain billions from public coffers, forcing hospitals to under-bill or deny care to seniors. Remember when 'choice' was going to fix healthcare? It seems 'choice' actually means forcing seniors into opaque private plans that then don't pay hospitals enough. Maybe if we stopped
treating healthcare as a corporate profit center, and less like a public good, 'health systems' wouldn't need to 'drop' plans—they would just care for patients. How many more retirees must navigate this bureaucratic maze before we admit the privatization experiment failed everyone but the insurance CEOs?