As caregiver for an elder, you can be drawn into every single aspect of the elder’s life. You can’t always tell what’s going to be hard and what’s going to be easy. Sometimes a complicated problem looks as simple as a piece of junk mail.
Thanks to Ronni Bennett of Time Goes By, I can pass along a heads-up about something really complicated that does come in the mail—offers for various Medicare Advantage plans. The long and short of it is that most of these “partially privatized” (read “government subsidized”) Medicare plans promise more than they deliver, sometimes a lot more.
The monthly premiums offered are typically lower, but this comes at a price. The plans often hold down premiums by increasing patient copays, creating new coverage exclusions and “cherry-picking” younger, healthier segments of the Medicare population. Growing numbers of doctors won’t even participate in some of these plans.
So, it seems that Medicare Advantage, at least in many of its iterations, may offer too little Medicare and hardly any advantage at all. If your elder receives a Medicare Advantage offer, you will want to get involved immediately in any decision-making about it.
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