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Hello!I can answer that for you.Watch out, older Americans and people with disabilities! Donald Trump just announced a plan to give corporate health insurers more control over your health care. His new executive order calls for “market-based” pricing, which would drive up costs for everyone with Medicare, eviscerate traditional Medicare, and steer more people into for-profit “Medicare Advantage” plans.Seema Verma, the Trump appointee who heads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), may not have warned Trump about the slew of government audits revealing that many Medicare Advantage plans pose “an imminent and serious risk to the health of… enrollees.” They also overcharge taxpayers to the tune of $10 billion a year.In the last few years alone, CMS’ limited audits have highlighted major issues with Medicare Advantage plans. Reports from the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and Government Accountability Office (GAO) have underscored these issues. They have recommended that CMS increase its oversight of Medicare Advantage plans and its enforcement efforts.A Medicare Payment Advisory Commission report indicates that the problems with Medicare Advantage may be even more far-reaching than the government audits indicate. The Medicare Advantage plans have failed to turn over reliable and complete claims data, as required by law. Without this data, it’s not possible to know whether they are covering the health care services they are paid to provide or to oversee them to the extent necessary.Last month, Senators Sherrod Brown, Amy Klobuchar, Chris Murphy, Richard Blumenthal, Bernie Sanders and Debbie Stabenow laid out several serious malfeasances by these corporate Medicare insurers—including UnitedHealth Group, Aetna, Cigna and Humana—in a detailed letter they sent to Verma.The insurers’ wrongdoings are systematic. They are ongoing. They endanger the health and financial well-being of millions of people. They undermine the financial integrity of the Medicare program and harm the U.S. Treasury. Yet, to date, CMS has failed to develop, let alone execute, a plan to hold these insurers accountable for violating their legal obligations and to ensure their members get the health care to which they are entitled.Tens of billions in overcharges are one big problem. Medicare Advantage plans have been overcharging the government for their services for many years now, by claiming that their members are in worse health than they actually are in order to increase payments. To make matters worse, they have refused to pay back the tens of billions in overpayments that the federal government has made to them. UnitedHealth successfully fought to keep the government from collecting this money.Another major concern is that Medicare Advantage plans are failing to cover the care their members need and are entitled to. Government audits show that Medicare Advantage plans are inappropriately delaying and denying care and coverage to hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of their members. This puts patients’ health and safety at risk. Thousands of people end up paying for care that should have been covered—or foregoing care altogether.CMS has not named or flagged these corporate health plans on its Medicare website or notified people in any other way of plans with serious violations, as it had agreed to do at the recommendation of the Office of the Inspector General. So, people with Medicare are unaware when they enroll in a Medicare Advantage plan that the government has found to be jeopardizing the health and safety of its members. Instead, CMS continues to give four- and five-star ratings to some of these health plans. In the process, it misleads older adults and people with disabilities about their performance.What’s more, CMS has found that a sizeable number of Medicare Advantage plans have for years issued highly inaccurate provider directories; and, the GAO has noted “concerns about ensuring enrollee access to care.” Many of these health plans have narrowed their provider networks. GAO suggests that it is not at all clear which of these Medicare Advantage plans have an adequate number and mix of health care providers in their networks.To date, the Trump administration has been steering people into Medicare Advantage plans, without regard to their deficiencies. And, it has failed to provide people with Medicare with meaningful information about their health plan choices as required by law. It is on a reckless path, promoting the business interests of Medicare Advantage plans that violate the law over the health care needs of vulnerable Americans.The administration and its congressional allies are playing a game of bait and switch with older adults and people with disabilities. They allow Medicare Advantage plans to lure people with benefits that traditional Medicare does not offer, such as dental care and transportation services to the doctor, without exposing their failings. The Trump administration’s goal is to fully privatize Medicare and shift more costs onto older and disabled Americans.To be clear, Trump’s executive order does nothing to hold the Medicare Advantage plans accountable for their fraudulent overcharges or their inappropriate denials of care and coverage. Rather, it rewards them. It gives them even more discretion regarding the services they cover and the freedom to create new bells and whistles to lure in members. The health and financial well-being of older and disabled Americans hangs in the balance.This answer is attributed to: The White House Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Watch Out, Seniors! Trump Just Launched a Stealth Attack on Medicare U.S. Government Accountability Office (U.S. GAO) shorten that long URL into a tiny URL U.S. Senator for Ohio An Official Website of the United States Government Healthcare News | Hospital News | Healthcare Companies | Fierce Healthcare Office of Inspector General Axios Breaking News, World News & Multimedia

The bulk of the evidence says Ayn Rand did accept Social Security and Medicare. We know for certain that Ayn Rand did accept Social Security, because a freelance writer named Patia Stephens filed a Freedom of Information Act request that uncovered a list of the dates and amounts of all Social Security benefits paid out to Ayn Rand and her husband Frank O'Connor (listed in records as Charles F. O'Connor). As the picture below indicates, Ayn Rand received Social Security benefits between 1974 and 1982.A similar Freedom of Information Act request that Patia Stephens filed with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) did not uncover any documents about Ayn Rand. Instead, the CMS would neither confirm nor deny that Ayn Rand received Medicaid benefits. However, even though we don't have 100% conclusive proof that Ayn Rand received Medicare benefits, we do have some solid evidence to back that up claim. To be specific, in 1998, Scott McConnell, then the communications director of the Ayn Rand Institute, conducted an oral history interview with Evva Joan Pryor, a social worker from New York who encouraged Rand to sign up for Medicare benefits. Here's the relevant part of the interview where Pryor talked to McConnell about signing Ayn Rand up for Medicare benefits:Pryor: She was coming to a point in her life where she was going to receive the very thing she didn’t like, which was Medicare and Social Security. I remember telling her that this was going to be difficult. For me to do my job she had to recognize that there were exceptions to her theory. So that started our political discussions. From there on – with gusto – we argued all the time.The initial argument was on greed. She had to see that there was such a thing as greed in this world. Doctors could cost an awful lot more money than books earn, and she could be totally wiped out by medical bills if she didn’t watch it. Since she had worked her entire life, and had paid into Social Security, she had a right to it. She didn’t feel that an individual should take help.McConnell: And did she agree with you about Medicare and Social Security?Pryor: After several meetings and arguments, she gave me her power of attorney to deal with all matters having to do with health and Social Security. Whether she agreed or not is not the issue, she saw the necessity for both her and Frank. She was never involved other than to sign the power of attorney; I did the rest.Pryor does not specifically say she signed up Ayn Rand for Medicare, but the reference to "power of attorney to deal with all matters having to do with health and Social Security" strongly suggests that she did, which would be totally consistent with her professional responsibilities as a social worker. According to the Patia Stephens article about this topic, Pryor and Rand were friendly to one another and would play Scrabble together, sometimes while having intense political discussions. Oh to have been a fly on the wall to hear some of those conversations!Source: Ayn Rand Received Social Security, Medicare

MA is NOT better than regular Medicare.In fact, it’s a big myth being perpetuated by an industry that sees BIG profits in offering Medicare Advantage (MA).MA is a classic example of how actuarial math works. It’s great if you’re healthy — because you pay less out-of-pocket (and you get better preventative benefits), but it’s lousy if you do get seriously ill (hospitalization or a disease like cancer) because out-of-pocket costs are much, much higher. In fact — seniors who DO get seriously ill — wind up opting back into regular Medicare which has better coverage for serious illnesses.But that’s just the actuarial math part for Medicare Advantage beneficiaries.It gets worse — a lot worse — when you add in the fraud on the part of the insurance industry selling these plans.Medicare Advantage is at the center of a growing number of fraud cases, some of which involve the biggest names in the health-insurance industry. In 2017, the DOJ joined a multi-million-dollar case against the nation's largest insurer, UnitedHealth Group, alleging widespread fraud dating back to 2006. The Justice Department is also investigating several other health insurers, including Anthem, Humana, Cigna, Health Net, and Aetna.An analysis co-authored by Fred Schulte, at the Center for Public Integrity, estimated that insurance companies had received nearly seventy billion dollars in undeserved Medicare Advantage payments between 2008 and 2013.Systemic theft creates cost inflation which increases political pressure to make cuts, often affecting both the healthy and the unhealthy parts of a program. “That's going to translate in one way or another to less medical treatment when it's needed, and clear incentives for the insurance companies to provide poorer-quality care," Sparrow said.“Indiscriminate cost cutting hurts the honest people more than the dishonest. If you just cut reimbursement rates, they'll just bill more. They're not constrained by the truth." If politicians don't learn to discriminate between fraud and legitimate activity, Sparrow warned, "this will grow like a cancer and destroy your program.""We've never been able to get a direct measure of exactly how much fraud there is, but one of the clearest indicators is that, the more money is spent on fighting fraud, the more money is recovered by the government." Peter Budetti - former Deputy Administrator at CMS