About those Medicare vouchers - why would insurance companies

[hedgehog]

lower prices to compete for Medicare recipients who use more medical services, when the insurance companies don't cut rates when competing to cover healthy young adults?

[Scuba]

1. They wouldn't. They'd accept the voucher and demand an add'l $6,000 (on avg) per person.

[rfranklin]

3. I suspect that the $6000 is actually a low ball figure...

When they have to cover the old and infirm the extra premiums will go through the roof.

[Scuba]

4. Lesseee... 80 years old, heart condition, diabetes... that'll be your voucher plus $400,000.

[Bluenorthwest]

2. They don't do Double Coupons in the Insurance Industry?

Who knew?

[Vox Moi]

5. The voucher system is exactly what insurance companies want ....

... The Money, with no accountability.
Vouchers effectively takes oversight and evaluation impossible. All the government will know is how much it is providing to individuals. There will be no aggregate data resource on what care is being delivered or how effective that care is because the entire body of data - and any means of enforcing standardized medical coding - will be eliminated. It would make meaningful health services research nearly impossible.
Medicare will be reduced to a check-writing function.
Might as well dismantle HHS and the Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ) while we're at it.
All we'd need is an accounting department.
Vouchers will create a level playing field alright: a population of isolated individuals who have nowhere to turn.