Medicare=Choice, just another aspiring private insurance product? BD
It's called Medicare+Choice and it's an option that has been around for a few years. The best way to characterize it is to call it the Trojan horse of the Medicare program. The hype is that it will give seniors more choices and offer them more benefits, but the reality is that it will make their lives more complicated and possibly make their health care much more expensive.
Some insurance companies selling Medicare+Choice plans went belly up because too many of their new subscribers were too sick. Were they that clueless about their new risk of insuring people over 65, or were they hopeful they could deny enough needed care to balance the books?
It means that if you enroll in a Medicare+Choice plan with a company that has figured out how to cut its losses, you run the risk of rule changes, rate changes and unexpected bills as well as having life and death decisions made by managed-care bean counters.
Making matters even more complex, if someone already has a Medicare supplemental policy and they want to switch to Medicare+Choice, the Medicare+Choice policy may or may not provide overlapping coverage, meaning it may or may not be able to replace the supplemental policy.
Make no mistake about it, Medicare+Choice is not about improving health benefits for seniors, it is about moving Medicare away from being a government program and becoming just another private insurance product.
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