Pepper Legacy Today
Since 2006, national health expenditure (NHE) growth has been slow relative to historic growth rates. Annual spending growth between 2006 and 2017 averaged 5.2 percent for Medicare, 6 percent for Medicaid, and 4.4 percent for private health insurance. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) project much faster growth in Medicare and Medicaid spending […]
Thanks to preventive medicine, older Americans have healthier hearts. Which also means, incidentally, that federal budgets are healthier, too. At the turn of the millennium, health spending growth was spiraling out of control. Economists projected that the already ginormous health-care sector would soon gobble up monster portions of the federal budget and the entire economy. […]
Some of the senior citizens who called Arizona insurance agent Denise Early wondered why their Medicare Advantage health plans were eager to send a doctor to visit them at home. A few worried that the offer might be a scam. After all, they asked, how many doctors make house calls these days? More than people […]
Four years ago, Medicare auditors came to an alarming conclusion: the federal government shouldn’t have paid a half-dozen insurance plans hundreds of millions of dollars to treat seniors in especially poor health. The findings signaled that billing errors could be deeply rooted within private Medicare Advantage plans — which contract with the federal government to […]
In Rochester, New York, a Medicare plan was paid $41 million to treat people with serious diseases — even though the plan couldn’t prove the patients in fact had those diseases. These health plans and hundreds of others are part of Medicare Advantage, a program created by Congress in 2003 to help stabilize health care […]
