Medicare Advantage funding to be cut

David Whelan chronicles the rise (and possibly future fall) of Medicare Advantage programs in his article “Unfilled Prescription” in Forbes. Earlier laws privatizing Medicare, starting with a pilot program in 1985, were written to give insurance companies only 95% of the money otherwise spent per Medicare member. The insurers were supposed to figure out how…

Picking a Medicare Plan

Which Medicare plan should you choose? Health journalist Charles Ornstein of the L.A. Times was making just this choice for his mother in “Puzzling out plan option for Medicare.” Even for a veteran health journalist, the choice is not as easy as it seems. Below, I will give some background information which will help people…