http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/opinion/...tml?ref=opinionPublished: December 26, 2007
Heavily subsidized private Medicare plans are continuing to prey on elderly Americans despite state, federal and industry efforts to stop them. It is yet another reason to rein in these operations by eliminating their unjustified subsidies.
These plans are a financial drag on Medicare as the government pays them about 12 percent more, on average, than the same services would cost in the traditional Medicare program. All too often, the private plans are an ethical horror as well.
As Robert Pear reported in The Times last week, unscrupulous insurance agents have tricked people into dropping traditional Medicare coverage and enrolling instead in private plans that do not meet their needs. Agents typically receive $350 to $600 for each patient they enroll in a private plan. Some try to boost sales by pretending to be Medicare officials, forging signatures or hiding the fact that a patient’s doctor will not be part of the private plan. Others barge into homes and use high-pressure tactics to push poor, semiliterate people into a private plan.
The Medicare Rights Center, an organization based in Manhattan that helps Medicare beneficiaries surmount bureaucratic obstacles, has a good vantage point for observing abuses.
As Jan Hoffman reported in Science Times last week, one disabled client of the organization was upset to find that the hospital where he had surgery on one eye would not operate on the other eye because it did not accept his private Medicare insurance. He had not sought to enroll in the private plan but had been solicited on the street by salesmen who did not tell him that he could use only the plan’s hospitals and doctors.
Although federal officials claim the number and severity of sales abuses have declined, they remain a dark stain on the ethical performance of private plans. Federal and state agencies need to redouble their efforts to root out abuses, and Congress ought to eliminate the unjustified subsidies that give private plans a competitive advantage over traditional Medicare.
##########
These plans are the latest effort to incremently destroy Medicare - If you have seniors considering changing or enrolling in one of these or the other misnomered "Advantage" plans, be sure they are kept fully informed before making such a decision. IT is not well known either that these plans are what are call Plan C.
More confusion in order to push the unaware into the wrong choice.
lenal