Medicare, Inc. Part 1: How Insurers Make Billions From Medicare

单集文稿 ...

• 00:05

  Medicare is America's government-run health care plan.

• 00:09

  It provides care for anyone 65 and over and some people with disabilities.

• 00:14

  But what a lot of people may not realize is that a majority of those on Medicare get it through a program called Medicare Advantage.

• 00:21

  Yeah,

• 00:22

  there's more than 60 million people in Medicare and more than half of those are in Medicare Advantage at this point.

• 00:28

  And the thing about Medicare Advantage is that the plans are paid for by the government but managed by private insurance companies.

• 00:37

  Medicare Advantage is sort of dominated by these huge insurance companies like United Health Group,

• 00:42

  Humana, Etna, and Elevens.

• 00:44

  And that's really why we called the series, at some level,

• 00:48

  Medicare Inc. Because people think, oh, this is a government program.

• 00:51

  But it's also a huge, huge, huge business for some of the biggest companies in America.

• 00:58

  I'm Chris Weaver.

• 01:00

  I'm Anna Willde Matthews.

• 01:02

  I'm an investigative reporter at the Wall Street Journal.

• 01:04

  And I cover health insurance.

• 01:06

  for the Wall Street Journal.

• 01:07

  My colleagues Anna and Chris have been investigating the Medicare Advantage program for over a year.

• 01:13

  So when you and the team looked into the program, what did you find?

• 01:17

  What we found was that Medicare Advantage insurers were basically gaming the system to get paid billions of dollars more and at the same time creating barriers to accessing care.

• 01:33

  Over the next two episodes,

• 全部文稿