Trump administration touts private plans for Medicare

WASHINGTON — Older Americans have been flocking to Medicare’s private plans, which promise predictable costs and extra benefits.

But the private Medicare Advantage plans have also been getting an unpublicized boost from the Trump administration, which has in the last few weeks extolled the virtues of the private plans in emails sent to millions of beneficiaries.

Medicare’s annual open enrollment period closes Friday. Administration officials expect almost 37 percent of the 60 million Medicare beneficiaries will be in Medicare Advantage plans in 2019, up from 28 percent five years ago.

The officials deny they are steering patients to private plans, but the subject lines of recent emails read like an ad. A message Oct. 25 said “Get more benefits for your money.” “See if you can save money with Medicare Advantage,” another said a week later.

The messages, “paid for by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,” urge beneficiaries to “check out Medicare Advantage” and point to an online tool, the Medicare plan finder, to compare options.

“You may be able to lower your outof-pocket costs while getting extra benefits, like vision, hearing, dental and prescription coverage,” said an email sent Wednesday.

In small print, the emails say they were “created and distributed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.”

Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the agency was not favoring private plans over the original government-run Medicare program. But Richard S. Foster, who was for many years the nonpartisan chief actuary of the Medicare program, said the emails sounded “more like Medicare Advantage plan advertising than objective information from a public agency.”

For example, he said, private plans generally require beneficiaries to use a defined network of health care providers or pay more for care. But, in traditional Medicare, beneficiaries can go to any doctor who accepts Medicare.

Jo Murphy, director of Michigan’s Health Insurance Assistance Program, said: “It seems that there are a whole lot of promotional emails coming from the federal government. There does seem to be encouragement to go to Medicare Advantage, part of a trend favoring private companies over traditional Medicare, for whatever reason.”