Medicare Advantage Outperforms Medicare
We found that utilization rates in some major categories, including emergency departments and ambulatory surgery or procedures, generally were 20-30 percent lower in Medicare Advantage HMOs in all years. Medicare Advantage HMO enrollees initially had lower rates of ambulatory visits and hospitalizations, although these rates converged by 2008; they also received about 10 percent fewer hip or knee replacements. In contrast, HMO enrollees underwent more coronary bypass surgery than patients in traditional Medicare. These findings suggest that overall, Medicare Advantage HMO enrollees might use fewer services and be experiencing more appropriate use of services than enrollees in traditional Medicare.
Entire Health Affairs study on Medicare Advantage vs. traditional Medicare.
Interesting study… When you use your resources responsibly, like Medicare Advantage users are, better results usually follow.
This is very good to know for those who still believe that Medicare is an efficient program. There is a good number of people out there that still need to understand that a program that pretty much guarantees you to come back for more check-ups and medical services than usual, is NOT an efficient program. They believe that there’s nothing wrong with this and that if they are requiring patients to come back and use more services then that means these patients are getting treated…when in reality all it means is an increased waste of reources that could be more responsibly used. Perhaps this will show people out there that sometimes less means more.
Medicare Advantage HMO-1
Tradiation Medicare-0
What gives the Medicare Advantage an “advantage” over medicare in terms of better results. Could this difference be attributed to differences between the two consuming groups?
@Life of Pi
Medicare Advantage pays the premiums of a private provider, instead of the healthcare for an enrollee like traditional Medicare.
When will we get over the over-prescription mentality…
Very interesting.
Of course, they don’t address how the marketing for medicare advantage targets lower risk patients and cost’s medicare 15% more for each patient.