Wow, this Advisory Board article is full of total non sequiturs in addition to the usual liberal nonsense about Medicare. The Advisory Board is a left wing crony capitalism group that supposedly does economics research. If this article is any indication, its economists flunked Economics 101.
The article begins:
“Although Medicare Advantage (MA) was created as a way to reduce federal spending, the federal government generally pays MA insurers more than the plans actually pay for patient care.”
Those two statements are unrelated. The “although” is total nonsense. It
- could be true that the public Part C Medicare health plan program reduces federal spending and
- also true that the federal government pays Part C plan sponsors (only a minority of Part C plan sponsors are insurers) more than the sponsors pay providers.
In fact the first statement is undeniably true according to years and years of Annual Medicare Trustee reports (see table directly above--the 2016 numbers are now out and the right hand percentage continues to run under 100%).
And, separately, while there have certainly been some public Part C plan sponsors that paid out more than they took in, such sponsors don’t last long.
There are at least another half dozen outright errors or silly sentences similar to the first in this short article.
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