Should HHS Take from the Poor and Give to the Rich?
I find it interesting that CMS overpays for high risk or complex patients, even when there is overcoding and fraud via Medicare Advantage. Yet CMS will not pay more for truly complex patients across rural and underserved areas. The largest do well and the smallest struggle to survive. This is the payment design, the administration design, and the enforcement design. Behind each design and designer is a serious lack of awareness of the consequences for Americans most in need of care. From NPR by Schulte - "Instead of winnowing out abusive corporations, all insurance participants were punished: The study said that a number of large Medicare health plans, which were not named, raised risk scores far above their peers. But the agency chose not to ferret out the worst offenders to discipline them. Instead CMS cut rates industrywide in 2010 by 3.41 percent to offset the jump in risk scores." As noted in the NPR article, the Obama plan has cuts planned for Medicare Advantage, but