Minor Thoughts from me to you

The Medicare Advantage program gives seniors a choice. Instead of participating in the traditional Medicare program, they can "spend" their Medicare dollars on a health plan from a private insurer. President-elect Obama thinks we should eliminate that choice.

We've got to eliminate programs that don't work, and I'll give you an example in the health care area. We are spending a lot of money subsidizing the insurance companies around something called Medicare Advantage, a program that gives them subsidies to accept Medicare recipients but doesn't necessarily make people on Medicare healthier.

And if we eliminate that and other programs, we can potentially save $200 billion out of the health care system that we're currently spending, and take that money and use it in ways that are actually going to make people healthier and improve quality. So what our challenge is going to be is identifying what works and putting more money into that, eliminating things that don't work, and making things that we have more efficient.

His statement is a blatant misrepresentation of Medicare Advantage. The money isn't a subsidy, it's a payment. The government gives the health plan a fixed amount of money and in return the health plan cares for the senior. If the senior's health care costs less than the payment, the health plan makes money. If not, the health plan loses money. It's a great incentive for the health plans to find cost-effective ways to treat people.

Eliminating that incentive won't "make people healthier and improve quality". It will probably bloat costs -- traditional Medicare pays doctors for each service performed, regardless of need or outcome.

No, this isn't about saving money or increasing quality. This is about kicking my grandmother off of her much-loved Kaiser Permanente plan and forcing her back into the arms of government bureaucrats. It's about increasing the government's control over us and eliminating our health care choices.