It was completely predictable that someone would take out the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. They’ve dropped healthcare plans and many/most providers in quite a few states. The fact people need to know when choosing between Traditional Medicare and a Medicare Advantage plan is that once you choose, that’s it. You can’t switch from Advantage back to Traditional Medicare.
Medicare Advantage becoming law was a shining symbol of unbridled Republican graft. I say that as a Republican. Just wait! With Worthless Don taking office they will once again try to privatize Social Security, turning it into Stock Market Bingo run by the Grifter Class. It will turn out just as good as this “Advantage” shit. (So named because corporations can now legally take advantage of you and get paid your tax dollars for doing it.)
Grifter Class Empowered
Facing financial and federal regulatory pressures, many insurers are pulling their Medicare Advantage plans from counties and states they’ve deemed unprofitable. Meanwhile, large health systems in states including Alabama, Minnesota and Vermont have cut ties with some Medicare Advantage plans.
Courtesy of Stateline
When something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Medicare Advantage plans were a scam from the beginning. Just how much quality healthcare do you expect for zero dollar premiums? In case you think I’m making that up here is a screen grab from their Web site.
Rather than fixing Medicare, allowing it to negotiate the price of all drugs and services, just like the private sector, lawmakers empowered the grifter class. They planned on using negotiated prices and collecting windfall profits from your tax dollars. Make no mistake, when the federal government pays them for providing you coverage, it is coming out of everyone’s tax dollars.
UnitedHealthcare Bails
I’ve written about healthcare before on this blog. As I get closer to the age of signing up for Medicare, the ins and outs of Medicare attract more of my attention. Medicare Advantage was a scam from the beginning. There was no requirement in the law requiring providers to continue providing coverage! From what I can tell there was no requirement for them to have X% of all providers within a geographic area “in-network.” As soon as they could no longer scrape enough gravy off the top, they could just leave.
Once you’ve chosen Advantage, you will be taken advantage of for the rest of your life.
As long as you can pay premiums Medicare has to cover you, UnitedHealthcare does not.
The only way these companies can make money is by screwing the providers and vendors in a manner that Medicare cannot. Providers don’t have to do business with an insurance company, unlike Traditional Medicare.
Twisting in the Breeze
I do hope you read that fine article in Stateline. Over one million people were just left twisting in the breeze. Many are retired and budgeted for retirement based on the zero/low cost Advantage plan they purchased. Now they are left twisting in the breeze. Some of them were screwed from afar.
Medicare Advantage is popular among large employers, many of which are shifting their Medicare-age retirees into these plans. And most states offer Medicare Advantage plans to retired state employees; in 13 states, it’s the only option. In some of those 13 states, retirees forfeit their health benefits in perpetuity if they choose coverage under traditional Medicare.
From Stateline article
That’s correct, your “large employer” could have shafted you with Medicare Advantage despite you wanting Traditional Medicare because the Grifter Class is large.
What We Will Find
Lots of Senior Citizens get pissed at me when I point out, correctly and half in jest, that a life sentence ain’t what it used to be for them. I will wager an entire can of Diet Mt. Dew the shooter turns out to be someone who no longer has viable coverage from a UnitedHealthcare Medicare Advantage plan. Either they were boldly non-renewed by the Grifter Class chasing higher quarterly profits or the only remaining in-network providers are hours, possibly hundreds of miles away.
For Seniors, many of whom will have one or more chronic conditions which need increased services, making a hundred mile commute for a doctor appointment may not be feasible. At some point they take your driver’s license because your vision is too poor or reflexes too slow.
Someone of advanced age who can no longer get the care they need, or who has a loved one that can no longer get the care they need, will be the shooter. If it is a loved one they might have died from lack of care when providers got dropped from network and their funds didn’t cover it.
Summary
When you privatize “end of life” services, you have to have a titanium clad bond locking those private providers into indentured servitude. Blatantly screwing Senior Citizens with a mass pull-out for a city/county/state is going to send someone over the fence. If that someone has a chronic or terminal-without-treatment condition, they are not going to have anything to lose. Without meds most older diabetics won’t make it a year. Intense cases of Diabetes won’t last a week.
Terminal-without-treatment is a much larger pool than most wish to believe.
What is stunning is that the board of directors and upper management went ahead with the mass screwing, never considering this.
