Medicare Advantage and Obama's statement today on ABC's This Week..........

From John Curry, January 11, 2009

STRS should have second thoughts about adopting a Medicare Advantage program...the following contains just one of the reasons. John

1/11/09 ABC's interview with Obama on "This Week"

"STEPHANOPOULOS: So how do you pay for health care?

OBAMA: Well, you know, these are going to be major challenges. And we’re going to have to make some tough choices. Now, what I’ve done is indicated to my team that we’ve got to eliminate programs that don’t work. And I’ll give you an example in the health care area. We are spending a lot of money subsidizing the insurance companies around something called Medicare Advantage, a program that gives them subsidies to accept Medicare recipients, but doesn’t necessarily make people on Medicare healthier. And if we eliminate that and other programs, we can potentially save $200 billion out of the health care system that we’re currently spending, and take that money and use it in ways that are actually going to make people healthier and improve quality. So what our challenge is going to be is identifying what works and putting more money into that, eliminating things that don’t work, and making things that we have more efficient. I’m not suggesting, George -- I want to be realistic here -- not everything that we talked about during the campaign are we going to be able to do on the pace that we had hoped."