Brilliant Harvard Professors Breathlessly Propose Medicare Program That Has Existed for 15 Years

A brilliant new Harvard-based goo-goo academic paper has been released¹ with the breathless conclusion that the government should start an advice program for Medicare beneficiaries. In general the goo goos lack the perspective of a Medicare beneficiary like myself but because I am also a certified SHIP counselor, I really find the conclusion weird. The goo goos claim specifically that the public Part C Medicare Advantage health plan program should have a PPACA-Navigator-like function. What are they thinking of? 

Medicare has had State Health Insurance Programs (known as SHIP in most states but also as SHINE, HICAP and by various other acronyms) for years. That's where the PPACA idea comes from.

¹In addition the Harvard paper is full of all the typical academic goo goo errors concerning Medicare

• First, Part C PFFS plans were not popular (and have been all but phased out) compared to other Part C options. The Harvard research treats the phase out as an "oh by the way, the program effectively does not exist anymore." PFFS was never significant (in fact, in the real world, wasn't it dumb to have a fee for service option in a capitated program?). The possible explanations the authors raise for PFFS' lack of popularity like choice overload and cognitive disabilities are way off course; in fact, all the people I dealt with as a SHIP volunteer made exactly the right choice to stay away from our our local AARP-sponsored PFFS policyh. 
• Second, the choice that no longer exists was not between Original Medicare (OM) itself and a PFFS plan add on to OM as Harvard presents the choice but between a PFFS plan as an OM add-on vs. a Medigap plan as an OM add on.  The paper does not seem to highlight this -- except in a footnote and parenthetical phrase from my reading -- although the methodology says it took it into account. The Harvardians specifically do not illustrate the real world situation in Figure 1. 
• I also see no indication in the real world of the Harvarians' claim that the "principal source" of the increasing popularity of Part C plans in general after 2003 were the "generous payments made to MA plans." Only guessing at what they even mean by that wording, the Part C program has increased in popularity more rapidly since 2010 although the "generous payments" have become much less generous than they were before 2010.