More than half of seniors choose private Medicare Advantage plans instead of traditional Medicare. As rural enrollment increases, many small-town hospitals say that threatens their viability.
It’s not just Medicare advantage. Some large plans are brutal in negotiating rates. I know of a small urban hospital that was getting lower reimbursement from a private insurance company than what Medicaid (typically the lowest payer) was paying them.
What is that hospital going to do though? Reject the plan? If that plan covers 25% of the people in the hospital’s neighborhood, they can’t very well reject those people or they all end up in the ED as charity care cases.
Presuming ED means the emergency dept 🤭
Seems like a firm enough assumption.
thats why i stay poor so i can have the best healthcare 😭
The easiest way to make profits as an insurance company is to not pay. It’s a terrible economic model
We need public hospitals.
We need public hospitals.
We need public hospitals again.
My hospital is not rural, but we are a small community, high-Medicaid population hospital. We’ve not been profitable 3 out of the past 5 years and the response from the (out-of-state) for-profit corporation has been to slash staff to such low levels that the nurses are finally unionizing.
We are a critical healthcare access point for our community. And that corporation has zero incentive to do what’s right for my neighbors. Only the city, state, maybe federal governments have that incentive. We should be a government operation, not private. It’s that simple.
The economics of private healthcare doesn’t work. It really doesn’t work in rural communities. We need a medicare for all to help these areas. Why they continue to not support it makes no sense.
Would be nice if the article explained why so many people are choosing Medicare Advantage over Medicare.
I live in a quasi rural area, and the only insurer dropped out in May.
I ended up getting helicoptered from the local hospital to a bigger hospital in another county where I have no coverage two weeks ago. The out of network deductible is $8,000.
I hate this system.
