Documenting the Better Care, Lower Cost Advantages of Medicare Advantage
A study published in this month’s edition of the American Journal of Managed Care brings hard data to an argument many of us have been making for some time, that private Medicare Advantage plans are doing a superior job of delivering high-quality care at less cost than traditional Medicare.
The study, led by Dr. Bruce E. Landon of the Harvard Medical School and funded by a grant from the National Institute on Aging, examined price-standardized resource usage and care delivery for patients with diabetes or cardiovascular disease in both Medicare Advantage plans and traditional fee-for-service Medicare. The takeaways from the study included:
• For both health conditions examined, relative resource use was lower in Medicare Advantage plans than it was in traditional Medicare
• Although there was variation among individual plans, quality of care for diabetes and cardiovascular disease was higher in Medicare Advantage plans.
The study concludes, “Proponents of managed care have long argued that integrated health plans can deliver care more efficiently than traditional fee-for-service care by using their ability to tailor their provider networks to the needs of their population and to implement disease and case management programs to improve chronic disease management. In this large national study of enrollees with diabetes or cardiovascular disease, our findings suggest that many Medicare HMO health plans are able to deliver care of equal or better quality with lower (resource usage) than traditional Medicare.”
These findings, I would add, echo what we hear at the Healthcare Leadership Council on a regular basis from not only our health plan members, but also from hospital leaders – that, in terms of attacking chronic disease in a cost-efficient way, Medicare Advantage has a strong upper hand over conventional Medicare.
