How Successful Is Medicare Advantage?

How successful is Medicare Advantage?

CONTEXT Medicare Part C, or Medicare Advantage (MA), now almost 30 years old, has generally been viewed as a policy disappointment. Enrollment has vacillated but has never come close to the penetration of managed care plans in the commercial insurance market or in Medicaid, and because of payment policy decisions and selection, the MA program is viewed as having added to cost rather than saving...

Paying Medicare Advantage plans by competitive bidding: how much competition is there?

Private health plans that enroll Medicare beneficiaries--known as Medicare Advantage (MA) plans--are being paid $11 billion more in 2009 than it would cost to cover these beneficiaries in regular fee-for-service Medicare. To generate Medicare savings for offsetting the costs of health reform, the Obama Administration has proposed eliminating these extra payments to private insurers and institut...

Who Benefits from Medicare Advantage

March 2013: Medicare Advantage update.

Key Data Findings. (1) From March 2012 to March 2013, rural enrollment in Medicare Advantage (MA) and other prepaid plans increased by over 200,000 enrollees, to more than 1.9 million. (2) Preferred provider organization (PPO) plan enrollment increased to nearly one million enrollees, accounting for more than 51% of the rural MA market (up from 48% in March 2012). (3) Health maintenance organiz...

How Successful is Nation-State?

The paper discusses pro-nationalist authors (D. Miller, A. Oldenquist, M.Canovan) who claim that states formed around a particular ethno-cultural nation have been historically sucessful, in terms of economic success, justice, democracy and solidarity. It is argued that their claims fail: in typical and wellknown cases there is an inverse correlation between the strenght of nationalism and the s...