Red1966 Supports this:
[h=1]The Medicare Advantage Scam[/h]
Philip Rucker takes a good, hard
look
at the scam that is Medicare Advantage. Essentially, it works like this:
Congress allowed private HMOs to compete for Medicare patients under the
rationale that they could offer better service at lower cost than the
government. They couldn't. So Republicans in Congress began boosting their
payments, to the point that Medicare Advantage gets paid 114 percent what
Medicare gets paid to care for a patient. That leads to some fun perks, like
free gym memberships and complimentary aspirin and band-aids, which in turn
leads seniors to defend the program because they like their perks. But it also
means a lot of unnecessary expense for taxpayers.
And it's important to remember that those free perks do not account for the
whole of Medicare Advantage's overpayments. Rather, economists have
estimated
that for every extra dollar we pay the program, 14 percent is passed on to
seniors and 86 percent goes to profits or other costs. In other words, we're
getting only 14 cents of obvious value for every dollar of overpayment
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/10/the_medicare_advantage_scam.html