Medicare is the largest payer in the $2.5 trillion dollar health care sector. Medicare made up one-fifth of that amount. Where does this money go? In a previous post I examined where Medicare payments went in 2008, and today I update those figures for 2010.
Source: MedPAC. Report to The Congress: Medicare Payment Policy, March 2011.
I know you are just passing along MedPAC data, but to present an accurate picture, the Medicare Advantage “slice” needs to be disaggregated and assigned to the respective provider categories. That is, a big chunk of the MA “slice” is paid to hospitals, another big “slice” is paid to docs, and so forth. To get an accurate picture, MedPAC ought to allocate only that part of the MA dollar retained by the insurers for admin and profit as an MA expenditure. Again, I know that this is just pass-through data, but that kinda makes my point.