Another Times' health-care-related piece I found useful to read, on the looming crisis with Medicaid regarding long-term care, exacerbated by the availability of gene testing. The elephant in the room which rarely gets mentioned by either party is that Medicare doesn't cover the nursing home by grandma. More and more grandmas are now gaming the system and buying long-term insurance if they are high risk and not if they aren't. In the article is the elusive figure, hard to find: 2/3 of nursing home patients are on Medicaid, far from being just for "poor people" under 65, and it's looking like that number is going to go up:

New Gene Tests Pose a Threat to Insurers

By Gina Kolata, May 12

[....] Two-thirds of nursing home residents are on Medicaid, and the remaining private insurers are already struggling. In the early 2000s, more than 100 firms offered long-term care insurance, according to the Treasury Department. By the end of 2015, only 12 firms offered it, and new enrollees fell from 171,000 to 104,000.

The insurers charged too little for these policies, experts say; policyholders have turned out to be much sicker than anticipated. To pay for an unanticipated increase in policyholders who develop Alzheimer’s, insurers would have to raise prices, said Don Taylor, a professor of public policy at Duke University who has studied the issue [...]

And yet another piece of interest at the Times, on major insurance co. bilking Medicare with the Medicare Advantage Plans:

A Whistle-Blower Tells of Health Insurers Bilking Medicare

When Medicare was facing an impossible $13 trillion funding gap, Congress opted for a bold fix: It handed over part of the program to insurance companies, expecting them to provide better care at a lower cost. The new program was named Medicare Advantage.

Nearly 15 years later, a third of all Americans who receive some form of Medicare have chosen the insurer-provided version, which, by most accounts, has been a success.

But now a whistle-blower, a former well-placed official at UnitedHealth Group, asserts that the big insurance companies have been systematically bilking Medicare Advantage for years, reaping billions of taxpayer dollars from the program by gaming the payment system.

The Justice Department takes the whistle-blower’s claims so seriously that it has said it intends to sue the whistle-blower’s former employer, UnitedHealth Group, even as it investigates other Medicare Advantage participants. The agency has until the end of Tuesday to take action against UnitedHealth [.....]