More bad news for seniors: [Home health care] currently accounts for 3.7 percent of the Medicare budget, but would absorb 10.2 percent of the savings squeezed from Medicare by the House bill and 9.4 percent of savings in the Senate bill, the Congressional Budget Office says.
The U.S. says it approved $142 million in commercial and donated medical exports to Cuba in 2008. So why did less than 1 percent of it get there?
As part of the Medicare Modernization Act in 2003, Congress created a new drug benefit — called Medicare Part D — for retirees at a cost of about $1,900 per recipient per year. Many private employers already provided drug coverage for their retirees, and the administration and Congress did not want to tempt employers into dropping their coverage… [So] the legislation created a $600 tax-free benefit (the equivalent of $800 cash for employers), and it worked. Employers continued to cover about seven million retirees who might have otherwise been dumped into Medicare Part D.
But now that subsidy is coming in to be clipped [by] a little-noticed provision buried deep in both the House and Senate health-care reform bills. Intended to save billions of dollars, [it will] instead hurt millions of seniors.
The group and its subsidiaries collected more than $650 million in royalties and other fees last year from the sale of insurance policies, credit cards and other products that carry the AARP name, accounting for the majority of its $1.14 billion in revenue, according to federal tax records. It does not directly sell insurance policies but lends its name to plans in exchange for a tax-exempt cut of the premiums.
Democratic proposals to slash reimbursements for another program, called Medicare Advantage, are widely expected to drive up demand for private Medigap policies like the ones offered by AARP, according to health-care experts, legislative aides and documents.
If the House Democrats health care bill becomes law, the report argues, it would be a boon to AARP, because while Medicare Advantage plans will be required to pay out 85 percent of the money collected in premiums to claims made by policy holders, the requirement would only be 65 percent for the kind of Medigap policies sold by AARP.
“In other words, under the Democrat bill, seniors could pay as much as 20 cents more out of every premium dollar to fund ‘kickbacks’ to AARP-sponsored Medigap plans than Medicare Advantage plans,” the GOP report charges.
Surprisingly, they are low-income and minority seniors, the ones most likely to be Democratic Party voters. Seniors enrolled in MA have lower incomes than the average senior in Medicare:
47% of MA enrollees have incomes below $20,000.
Only 6% of MA enrollees have incomes above $50,000.
Hispanic and African-American seniors are most likely to choose MA over the traditional Medicare program:
1 in 3 Hispanic seniors are enrolled in MA.
1 in 4 African-Americans seniors are enrolled in MA.
Almost one in every four seniors is enrolled in a Medicare Advantage (MA) plan. These plans are run by private insurers. They receive a risk-adjusted annual fee for each enrollee from Medicare; and they tend to provide comprehensive benefits, similar to what nonseniors typically have. President Obama says the government is overpaying and wants to cut revenues to these plans by $177 billion over ten years. Industry sources say 5 million seniors would lose their coverage as a result. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says that under House Bill (H.R. 3200) 3 million current enrollees would lose coverage, rising to 6 million by 2019.
I previously reported on the relative performance of eight major MA plans vis-a-vis conventional Medicare. Now there is new data for all MA plans versus all standard Medicare in two states: California and Nevada. Assembled by the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality the data shows:
Roger Ferguson, president and CEO of TIAA-CREF and a member of the Transition Economic Advisory Board assembled by President-elect Barack Obama, includes the following in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:
Encourage health-related savings. According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a couple that retires today will need from $200,000 to $635,000 to pay out-of-pocket health-care costs (above Medicare). Few private-sector employers offer workers an account to save for such costs. Last year's agreement among the Big Three automakers and the United Auto Workers to establish tax-free trusts for worker health is an approach gaining favor among academic institutions. Now Congress needs to enable people with these accounts to leave any unused balance to heirs.This will encourage people to hold on to their savings until the last years of their lives, when health-care money is most needed.
On average, Canadian seniors pay 101 percent more than American seniors for identical generic drugs.
On average, Canadian seniors pay 57 percent less than American seniors for identical brand namedrugs.
Higher Canadian generic prices are caused by government policies that shield retail pharmacies and generic manufacturers from competitive market forces that would put downward pressure on generic prices.
