Medicare and Black Friday

Black Friday thought: Medicare is imploding while Medicaid is exploding.

Anonymous

November 26, 2011- Black Friday has come and gone.

For retailers "Black Friday" was the day after Thanksgiving, the point at which retailers begin to turn a profit, i.e., go into the black.

For shoppers “Black Friday,” was a wild and crazy hunt for bargains, starting for most at the stroke of Midnight and going on all day Friday.

For Medicare recipients, Black Friday meant something different.

Black Friday for Medicare Recipients ends on December 7 this year. That's the day Medicare deadline signups loom.

There’s plenty of Medicare shopping to do over Thanksgiving weekend and beyond. Seniors have only two weeks left to choose a new Medicare Advantage or prescription drug plan, if they want to change from their current ones.

Medicare’s open enrollment deadline was pushed up this year, from Dec. 31 to Dec. 7, as part of the 2010 federal health reform law. The earlier deadline is meant to ensure that beneficiaries are properly enrolled and get their new membership cards by the start of the plan year Jan. 1.

That’s why you see many TV ads, mailers and events calling attention to it. Few callers to the groups’ helplines are asking about the deadline; talk is now almost entirely about picking a plan.

Many Medicare beneficiaries might still be unaware of the December 7 date The “four C’s” of picking a plan are cost, coverage, convenience, and customer service.

Go to Medicare.gov to judge the relative merits of various Medicare plans, including Medicare Advantage and Medigap policies. People often forget about customer service, in particular. It’s important to evaluate the responsiveness of your Medicare provider, as well as to consider other providers and their ratings.

Medicare’s official website features a plan comparison tool, which includes the star ratings that CMS awards based on quality factors such as rates of hospital readmission.

Depression Friday

Black Friday Is also Depression Day Medicare Recipients. The color black also connotes depression, as in a black mood. It’s no secret Medicare recipients are the age group most opposed and most skeptical to the Accountable Care Act.

Many, 2'3s to be precise, are in a black mood if you can judge by polls of seninors who oppose the bill. The law requires cutting over $500 billion out of Medicare and eliminating many of the benefits of Medicare Advantage Plans.

There are other objectionable features as well.

Here is a list of black features of the Accountable Care Act (Obamacare) composed by Jeffrey H. Anderson, former senior speechwriter for Secretary Mike Leavitt at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

• It’s 2,700 pages long, so few people really understand it and its consequences.

• It has caused 4.5 million Americans to lose their employer-sponsored health insurance and be dumped into Obamacare “exchanges.”

• It loots Medicare. The CBO projects that during the overhaul’s real first decade (2014 to 2023), nearly $1 trillion would be siphoned out of Medicare and spent on Obamacare.

• It costs twice as much as the deficit commission is trying to “save.” The CBO says that Obamacare would cost an estimated $2.5 trillion during its real first ten years.


• It raises, rather than lowers, health costs. The Medicare chief actuary says that Obamacare would increase health costs by hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of this decade.

• It massively expand sMedicaid, at a time when our national debt is $15,000,000,000,000.00 and is about the size of our entire gross domestic product, Obamacare would provide a colossal expansion of Medicaid — expanding it to cover many of the middle class.


• It establishes the IPAB. The Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) is a version British National Institute for Clinical Health and Excellence (NICE), the British rationing agency .

• It politicizes medicine and amases unprecedented power and money in Washington at the expense of Americans’ liberty.

Tweet: Black Friday is a good time to start seriously thinking about picking a Medicare plan and for considering the consequences of health reform.