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Bob Herman of Stat casts a cold eye on a new claim from AHIP that Medicare Advantage provides superior value to the federal government:
America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s primary lobbying group, funded a new report that was conducted by actuaries at Wakely Consulting Group. AHIP claims the report proves Medicare Advantage...is “saving Americans billions of dollars every year.” The actuaries, however, never use that language in the report.
STAT spoke with several independent Medicare policy experts, all of whom said AHIP’s report was incomplete at best and refuted by other studies that analyzed the same data.
AHIP's press release asserts that "in 2019, rather than being 2% more expensive than original Medicare, on an apples-to-apples basis, average MA spending was actually about 7% lower than original Medicare."
That conclusion is based on two claims grounded in the Wakely analysis:
