Medicare Advantage Supplemental Benefits: Origins, Evolution, And Issues For Policy Making
Health Affairs September 19, 2024
Editor’s Note
This article is the first in the Health Affairs Forefront series, Supplemental Benefits in Medicare Advantage, featuring analysis and discussion from all stakeholder perspectives with the goal of informing the rapidly changing policy landscape on this topic. Additional articles will be published through mid-2025. Readers are encouraged to review the Call For Submissions for this series. We are grateful to The SCAN Foundation for its support of this work.
Supplemental benefits in Medicare Advantage (MA) have grown into a $64 billion annual health care expenditure. That’s about 17 percent of what the government pays in total to the private insurers who operate Medicare plans under MA. Yet little is known about the government’s return on investment for this...