Medicare Advantage. It's not Medicare. And it's not an advantage.

We chose traditional Medicare with a supplement and a part D plan largely for that very reason, along with travel coverage.

I have since seen friends and family have to jump through unreasonable hoops to get their needed treatments approved by Advantage plans.

We pay more in premiums but I think it's worth it.

Same here, Mik. If I get sick the last thing I want is a hassle getting care I need.

I have one and it’s been fine, and added bonus $50 a month to spend at CVS. I haven’t had the nerve to see if I can use that to purchase wine sold at my local CVS.

Do it! Wine is healthy. Michael Corleone said so.

A friend of mine has been in the hospital for the past six weeks. On November 1 he went in for a hernia repair. They punctured his esophagus with the tube they put down his throat--the hole was the size of an egg--and before they discovered it all kinds of stuff that went down his throat ended up in his chest cavity. He was moved to the ICU and put on a ventilator. Once they got the esophagus opening closed, they had to put him under again to lavage his lungs, because he couldn't cough or clear his throat due to the pain of all the tubes stuck in his chest to vacuum out the crap in there.

I spoke to him yesterday (he's 3,000 miles away or I'd be visiting him every day) and for the first time since this nightmare began he had been able to get himself out of bed and sit upright in a chair--and was totally exhausted from it.

Thankfully he signed up for Medicare before this happened and chose Plan G for his medigap plan. He won't owe anything, and will not have to fight with private insurers.

It's too early to talk about suing the hospital and the anesthesiologist for malpractice--he has to get well first. But believe me, we are thinking about it.

You can be doing just fine and feel like going with Medigap would be a waste of money--until you no longer are. Who wants to deal with fighting insurance companies while trying to just survive?

I am grateful that I don't have to step up to fight that fight for him because of the insurance choices he made.

Yeah, we want nothing to do with Medicare Advantage.

It's the privatization of Medicare, and I don't think the public would have accepted it if we had been given a choice.

Ahh, but we are being told how much money we will get for choosing it!

The insurance companies are paid a fixed amount per subscriber. I'm sure there are calculations for outliers, but the bottom line is they are incented to deny care. Not a good model.

We do get a choice, but some people can't afford the traditional Medicare option, so MA gives them a certain level of coverage at a much lower cost. I think that a lot of people don't understand the tradeoffs they make when choosing, and they find out what they've given up in flexibility and options at a time when they need them the most.

Whether health care should cost so much is part of another discussion.

The important point to remember is that once you choose MA, you can't switch over to the Medigap plans without undergoing underwriting, and they don't have to accept you.

Good point. You're only guaranteed acceptance into any plan for the first six months after you qualify for Medicare. After that, you're in the underwriting pool...