Retirement Healthcare and Medicare
Retirement expert Bob Carlson’s research and knowledge on how to get the most out of healthcare options
Found 325 Articles.
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Where Your Medicare Dollars Go
The recent release of Medicare data continues to reveal valuable new information. The latest is that Medicare pays $5 billion annually for ambulance services, more than is paid to cancer doctors. More importantly, a portion of these ambulance payments go to what are essentially taxi services that are transporting patients who can drive themselves or […]
Diving Into the Medicare Data
Recently the Center for Medicare and Medicaid released a bunch of data that various people have been pouring through. Here’s an interesting post pointing out how much Medicare paid for chiropractic treatments and asserting all this is wasted money. I’ve never had a chiropractic treatment, but I know people who have. They say it works, […]
Where Medicare Dollars Go
As the Center for Medicare and Medicaid has become more open with data, we’ve learned more about government medical spending. A few years ago we learned that treatments for what appear to be the same conditions vary greatly around the country, as do the costs and the results. This week we learned that a small […]
Medicare Cuts Delayed
In what has become an annual charade, Congress voted to defer until next year the reductions in reimbursements to doctors and hospitals under Medicare. The cuts, slated to be 24%, are used to seem to reduce Medicare spending. But each year they are deferred or changed because doctors and hospitals point out that they would […]
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The Coming Medicare Advantage Cuts
Government policy for several years has been to reduce the reimbursements paid to insurers who offer Medicare Advantage plans. The plans have become very popular, now enrolling 38% of Medicare beneficiaries, according to some estimates. But the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid announced recently that the reimbursements are likely to be reduced again for 2015. […]
Medicare Prescriptions Receive a Reprieve
A few weeks ago I reported on a proposal by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid to potentially limit some drugs covered by Part D. Briefly, Medicare has six classes of drugs that are protected under the program. If a doctor prescribes a drug in that class, it is considered covered. The agency proposed that […]
Curbing the High Cost of Retirement Medical Care
The cost of medical care continues to rise and to be the wild card in retirement plans. Reports and studies update their estimates of the cost of retirement medical care each year. They show the cost to be high and also very unpredictable for individual retirees and couples. The studies focus on average or median […]
Coming Changes in Medicare/Medicare Advantage
More changes, none of them positive, are on the way for those enrolled in Medicare or Medicare Advantage. First are the broader changes that apply to all Medicare prescription drug beneficiaries. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid quietly released a proposal to limit the types of drugs that are protected under the program. Those in […]
