The Sickest Patients Are Fleeing Private Medicare Plans--Costing Taxpayers Billions

[question everything]

136. You may want to read the whole story again. I have no idea where you got your conclusions

The story points a finger at insurance companies who refuse coverage for sick patients at the end of their lives, forcing them to switch to Medicare and, yes, get the government, yes, we, the taxpayers, to save the for profit companies millions.

If you've bothered to go to the source - free link, you'd read:

Patricia Greene had spent a month recovering from a devastating stroke when her Medicare Advantage insurer, a unit of UnitedHealth Group, decided to stop paying for her nursing home.

The 85-year-old was so weak and fragile, her son said, that she couldn’t even get herself out of bed. Her family felt she wasn’t ready to leave the facility in New York City’s Queens borough. So she dropped her UnitedHealth coverage and enrolled in the traditional version of Medicare run directly by the federal government.

That decision saved UnitedHealth tens of thousands of dollars in the months that followed, billing records show, and shifted onto taxpayers the cost of later hospital and nursing home care in what turned out to be the final months of her life.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of Medicare data found a pattern of Medicare Advantage’s sickest patients dropping their privately run coverage just as their health needs soared. Many, like Greene, made the switch after running into problems getting their care covered.