The original 1995 (proposal)-1997 (passage) intent was that public Part C Medicare health plan spending per person would be 5% less than spending on Medicare fee for service (FFS) beneficiaries. That's when Part C was supposed to be just HMOs and that was how HMOs worked in the real world, not controlled by dumb Congresspeople trying to buy votes. And that was the case for Part C of Medicare in its first few years up until around 2005.
Source: June 2016 Medicare Trustees Report, Tables II.B.1 and IV.C.1 and equivalent tables in previous year reports
Now it's back to the future (see illustration). For the last few years -- since the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) -- spending per public Part C Medicare beneficiary has dropped below 100% again, down to 96% in 2015.
In between, nutty Congresspeople added PPOs that brought the percentage up to about 100%, and added special deals for Democratic-leaning unions bringing it up to 103%, and added a crazy FFS plan that got paid like it was an HMO, bringing the difference up to 107% in 2007. All bad ideas. All the Congressional side deal except the PPO idea have been slowly ended (slowly, to be fair to the beneficiaries) or are on the way out and will be ended over the next few years. Now public Part C Medicare health plan program is working as originally intended by the Democrats who thought up the idea.
(Oh, in case you believed President Obama when he said Part C beneficiaries cost 15% more than FFS beneficiaries, he lied to you. In case you believed him when he said Part C was private, he lied to you. In case you believed him when he said Part C was a Republican idea, he lied to you. In case you believed him when he said his mother had been kicked off her health care insurance because she had cancer, he lied to you.)
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