Romney’s Approach To Medicare Reform Will Lead To Higher Costs, Study Finds

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/09/28/925741/romney-higher-medicare-costs/

By Sy Mukherjee posted from ThinkProgress Health on Sep 28, 2012


A new Urban Institute Health Policy Center study finds that premium support models, such as the proposed Romney/Ryan Medicare plan, are more likely to increase excess costs in the program.

According to the report, turning Medicare into a “premium support” program would encourage private insurers to draw less costly beneficiaries from traditional Medicare, leading to bloated per-beneficiary reimbursements. The study arrives at this conclusion by extrapolating existing trends in Medicare Advantage (MA), which has appreciably higher per-capita costs than traditional Medicare in 75 percent of counties serviced:

.....