Every far leftist in the country -- starting with former President Obama -- repeats the lie over and over that public Part C Medicare Advantage plans cost the government much more per person than traditional fee for service (FFS) Medicare costs per person. Here's Obama telling the lie (see Note). Here's Minority Leader Pelosi (when she was Speaker). Here's Hillary Clinton (even though Bill signed the Medicare health plan program into law). Here's John Dingell. (You won't find Chuck Shumer saying it because he won a Medicare Advantage award from the insnurance industry.)
Now why would I include John Dingell, some Congressperson few have ever heard of, in that litanty of far leftist saints. That's because the Dingells -- who have been sent to Congress by Michigan for three generations (I know the Congresswoman is John's wife but she is a different generation) -- are only for cutting the public Part C Medicare Advantage plans poor people like me can buy. As this recent letter shows, the Dingells are against cutting the leftist Medicare Advantage, the sweet deal union members get that the rest of us poor people are not eligible for. The big leftist lie in all Medicare reform debates is that they leave out the fact that there are really mutliple Medicares, roughly divided between those for we real people and those the left has rigged in its favor.
So when the left lies and claims that public Part C Medicare Advantage plans cost the government much more per person than traditional fee for service (FFS) Medicare costs per person we find out two things:
- Part C does not cost much more per person. Over its history, given the number of people using Part C now versus the number using Part C one or two decades ago, the program costs less per person (while delivering much better insurance and almost half the price)
- But there is a part of Part C that does cost substantially more per person. It is a special deal (called the Employer Group Waiver Plans program) that was primarily put in for unions (see any of MedPAC's annual reports to Congress, page 359 in this year's version). This is the part of Medicare Advantage leftists like the Dingells love.
NOTE: This speech is one of the places where Obama also told his fib about his mother's health insurance and her eventually fatal cancer. In this speech, Obama pulled a Clintonian "it all depends on what the definition of is is" and didn't claim she was refused insurance because of a pre-existing condition. Instead Obama just said that his mother was "worried about being refused." In reality, according to Politifact quoting the New York Times, she never had any issue with her health insurance.
