The lead of Politico’s story on the battle over Medicare Advantage cuts didn’t pull any punches: “The insurance industry chalked up one of its greatest political victories in recent memory Monday,” Brett Norman and Jennifer Haberkorn wrote, detailing how the trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) vanquished the forces of government evil—i.e., bureaucrats at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) who had proposed cutting payment rates for the plans.
Two months ago those regulators had proposed the cuts for Medicare Advantage plans—a private, and controversial, option for delivery of Medicare benefits. For years the federal government has been paying sellers of these plans more than it costs traditional Medicare to provide the same benefits. Obamacare imposed some reductions for the companies that offer Medicare Advantage plans, and in February CMS regulators called for an additional 2.3 percent cut as part of an annual review process.
Instead, CMS on Monday ruled that insurers would be seeing a 3.3 percent increase—a reversal worth billions to the industry.
The reversal comes after an intensive industry lobbying effort, both inside the Beltway and across the country. An Astroturf “grassroots” campaign launched by the industry’s sham consumer group, the Coalition for Medicare Choices, aired ads in several key states—“a political step that the industry hadn’t taken” in any fight since the passage of healthcare reform, one insider tells Politico. (Wonkblog’s Sarah Kliff has one of the ads in her write-up of the reversal.) The pull-out-all-the-stops campaign helped convince more than 160 members of Congress to ask CMS to reconsider. That kind of politics is hard to ignore.
So where was the press as this battle was unfolding—including local outlets in the places where the public campaign was being waged? Unfortunately, as I wrote on Friday, it was mostly nowhere to be seen.
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More Part C Medicare health plan ignorance from CJR. You reference Sarah Kliff's column of April 2 but apparently did not read it. Kliff writes:
"Cuts to Medicare Advantage plans mandated in the Affordable Care Act, for example, will still go forward."
CJR apparently did no research at all on this issue but simply thought you could gen up a story that did not exist. When you saw the most left-wing Congressional delegation in the country -- Massachusetts' -- going the other way, didn't dawn on you that you were missing something?
#1 Posted by Dennis Byron, CJR on Wed 3 Apr 2013 at 05:22 PM
I am a Medicare beneficiary and I have Medicare Advantage through UnitedHealthcare.
My primary care physician has indicated in the past that cuts to medical providers is a bad idea. He follows the insurance industry carefully.
I saw him today and he seemed to be in unusually lofty spirits.
Now I know why.
#2 Posted by Dwight Snider, CJR on Thu 4 Apr 2013 at 07:03 PM
Didn't the the "insurance" and "health care" industries pretty much write the legislation? Fascism, protectionism, cronyism, and cartel are the natural results of the expansion of centralized monopoly-power (a.k.a., govt). Why keep giving the serial offenders even more power, as if they'd reform themselves against their financial and political interests? A brave, free, independent press should at least entertain the idea of abolition every now and then. If this were the 1850s, would our vaunted journalistic luminaries be in favor of merely reforming that other, govt-instituted, govt-regulated system known as slavery?
#3 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Thu 4 Apr 2013 at 08:16 PM
I wonder how the insurance Calgary is doing. My cousin works up there with insurance so I'm a little worried.
#4 Posted by bills8091, CJR on Thu 13 Jun 2013 at 10:35 PM