For-profit healthcare companies, many of which are owned by private equity, are aggressively expanding their efforts to trick seniors into abandoning their enrollment in traditional Medicare and joining for-profit Medicare Advantage plans.

About half of all seniors are now enrolled in Medicare Advantage. The pitch for MA plans is seductive. They offer bells and whistles that are not part of Medicare. If you enroll in a MA plan, you will get free gym membership, prescription drug coverage, dental coverage, and a variety of other attractive benefits.

What’s wrong with MA? It’s great when you are not sick. It’s very bad when you have a serious illness.

When you have surgery or other serious illness, Medicare and your secondary pays almost all of your medical costs. MA may or may not. MA has panels to decide whether to pay your bills. You may be denied and stuck with huge bills.

Privatization produces worse service because the corporation must turn a profit. Make no mistake: MA is privatization.

How does MA make a profit? By denying the claims of patients.

I had open heart surgery in 2021. I was hospitalized for a month. I spent a week in the ICU (intensive care unit). When the total hospital bill arrived many weeks later, I almost had a stroke: it was over $839,000! After Medicare negotiated with the hospital, the actual cost to me was $300. That’s a miracle. Why give up that kind of coverage?

The Lever reports that the federal government has been complicit in tricking people to abandon Medicare and switch to Medicare Advantage.

It begins:

A new Medicare privatization scheme developed under President Donald Trump and now being expanded under President Joe Biden is forcing hundreds of thousands of seniors onto new private Medicare plans without their consent.

The development represents a troubling new dimension in the fight by corporate interests to privatize Medicare, the federal health insurance program for people 65 or older. Medicare Advantage, which allows for-profit health insurers to offer privatized benefits through Medicare, already results in unexpected costs for routine procedures and wrongful denials of care. Private plans have cost Medicare an astonishing $143 billion since 2008, and are now drivingsome health insurers’ record profits.

The new Direct Contracting Entity (DCE) program similarly adds a private-sector third party between patients and Medicare services. Medicare allows these intermediary companies to offer unique benefits, like gym membership coverage. But as for-profit operations ranging fromprivate insurers to publicly traded companies to private equity firms, these intermediaries are incentivized to limit the care that patients receive, especially when they are very sick.

While Medicare Advantage patients choose to sign up for private insurance plans, patients are being enrolled in these DCE health care plans without their informed consent. As Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) noted in a January op-ed, “Seniors in traditional Medicare may be ‘auto-aligned’ to a DCE if any primary care physician they’ve visited in the past two years is affiliated with that DCE. That means Medicare automatically searches two years of seniors’ claims history without their full consent to find any visits with a participating DCE provider as the basis for enrollment.”

Open the link and continue reading.

Don’t be fooled.