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From the Desk of ...
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Representative Steve King
5th Congressional District of Iowa |
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The Advantages of Medicare Advantage
What the Des Moines Register
Won't Let Me Tell You |
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{insert date} |
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Thirty-eight thousand, four hundred and fourteen (38,414) Iowa seniors will see their Medicare health coverage cut. Coverage that they’ve decided best meets their physical and financial needs. Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco-style Congress pushed for this cut, and the Register applauded it.
Next on the chopping block will likely be the Medicare health plans of another 13,935 Iowa seniors. These health care plans are similar to those that were recently cut, but the slate of savings and added benefits that they offer to seniors is, at least for the time being, apparently less objectionable than the coupling of these benefits and savings with the flexibility in choosing a provider that was offered to many rural Iowans by the now severely cut plan.
Anyone who regularly reads the Register knows that I’m talking about Medicare Advantage plans. As I’ve written before, Medicare Advantage allows rural Iowans maximum flexibility in choosing their healthcare providers. The Medicare Advantage program allows seniors to get their health insurance through private insurers, rather than through the traditional Medicare program. The result has been an option for seniors’ health insurance that’s delivered 8 million Americans an average of $1,032 per year in added benefits—benefits like reduced premiums and cost share, dental benefits, health education benefits, hearing benefits, vision benefits, and longer stays in inpatient and skilled nursing facilities. These are benefits that they wouldn’t otherwise get with traditional Medicare. Medicare Advantage allows seniors’ to choose a plan with a combination of benefits that best suits their needs, allowing them maximum flexibility in choosing their health care providers.
It was also once true that Medicare Advantage made it easier for rural Iowans to find medical care locally, instead of being limited to caregivers far away. However Pelosi’s Congress, with the full support of the Register, cut the kind of Medicare Advantage plans that allowed 38,414 Iowans to benefit from this flexibility. While the entire Medicare Advantage program provides seniors’ with added benefits and savings, one specific part of it, the Private Fee For Service program, allowed seniors to have the benefits of a Medicare Advantage plan without having to choose their providers from a specific network list. So, Medicare Advantage Private Fee For Service gave rural Iowans the added benefits to choose the kinds of medical providers that best met their needs, while letting them choose those providers that were most convenient for them to see.
The Pelosi Congress and its supporters on the Register Editorial Board don’t want seniors to have choices. They want every Medicare beneficiary to submit to the one-size-fits-all health care plan available to them through traditional Medicare. So, when it came time for Congress to take up annual legislation to prevent doctors across America from seeing devastating cuts to in their Medicare payments (which, on its own, I support and have cosponsored and repeatedly voted for), liberals in both chambers seized on the opportunity to slash the Medicare Advantage program and score political points.
The fact is, it didn’t have to be this way. The legislation pitted doctors against seniors and was a calculated move intended to exact a political price from all of us who support doctors and seniors and who refused to accept the “Devil’s Choice.”
This bill opportunistically used the temporary fix to doctors’ payments as an excuse to permanently undermine the choice that thousands of Iowans and millions of Americans have made to receive the health coverage that works best for them.
Pelosi’s Congressional liberals and their ally the Register Editorial Board have successfully crippled the Medicare Advantage Private Fee For Service coverage chosen by 38,414 Iowans. Given their penchant for supporting government’s bureaucratic one-size-fits-all approaches to problems rather than individuals’ choice, I believe the 13,935 Iowa seniors who still have Medicare Advantage plans have much to fear from liberals in Washington and at the Register.
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