Healthcare System Dementors

A public service for a better community

Jun 14, 2023

Happy Wednesday Healthcare Advocates

Remember our advocacy educates our representatives and lets them know what we want them to do for us.

Please enter requests for research using the comment button at the bottom. Some of you have asked for more doctor payment specifics with respect to HR 3421 and those details are being researched. Prison and Rural healthcare are also being investigated

Medicare Disadvantage Haunted by Dementors

Medicare Part C, also called Medicare Advantage, is a program whereby Medicare recipients can choose to have a private insurance company manage their healthcare payments instead of the federal government. Let’s remember that recently we saw that the top 7 CEOs of companies that sell these policies made $330 million last year. Let’s remember that almost all of those companies have ben accused of cheating the government, except Centene. And these shenanigans, cheating the government, paying hundreds of millions for executives, is all part of the extra cost that makes the US health system the most expensive in the world, in terms of percent of GDP and per capita.

Here is an Axios story about the cheating. It turns out that Medicare Advantage private insurance companies have been cheating to the tune of $75 billion per year. This is because they upcode the patients risk scores and extract easy to obtain bonus payments. The research was done at USC. Here it is. Let me put that in perspective for you. The United States spends $4 trillion dollars per year on healthcare. That is 4000 billion dollars. These cheats steal 75 billion our tax dollars that could help others. 75/4000 =1.8785%. Almost 2% of the entire US spending is stolen by private insurance cheats. These people stand between you and your doctor and suck the life out of our healthcare system. In the language of Harry Potter they are medical dementors.

Look, private insurance stands between you and your medical care. They demand copays, deductibles, have a cap on benefits, demand pre authorization and those are not necessarily based on science, and deny about 17% of all claims that doctors say are necessary.

Enough, Improved Medicare for All fixes this. You know what to do.

ACTION

Use RESISTBOT (text SIGN PNMWSY to 50409) or call or email your Congressional Representative and Senators and the President (their contact info is in the References Section) and tell them something like:

“My name is [name] and I live in [zipcode] and I am your constituent. I am very concerned about Medicare Advantage Programs stealing $75 billion each year from we the people in fraudulent upcoding of beneficiaries risk scores to get extra payments from the government per a USC study. The entire US spends $4 trillion on healthcare. This is 1.875% of every dollar the entire US (all of us) spend on healthcare in a year. STOP THE CHEATING.

Let’s be clear. Private insurance stands between you and your medical care. They demand copays, deductibles, have a cap on benefits, demand pre authorization and those are not necessarily based on science, and deny about 17% of all claims that doctors say are necessary and they cheat on top of it.

I want you to cosponsor either HR 3421 or S 1655 Improved Medicare for All and end this healthcare nightmare. You can do this and I am counting on you.”