Ana Wildey-Matthews

We found that people in their last year of life left Medicare Advantage and went back to traditional Medicare at double the rates of other enrollees. That's my colleague Ana again. Why would people in that last year of life leave Medicare Advantage at a higher rate than everybody else?

It raises the question of whether these people who are very sick and have very intense and expensive health needs were running into barriers in accessing the care that they wanted or the care that they felt they needed.

Medicare Advantage cost the federal government more than $460 billion last year. That's a lot of money.

Once you sort of have the data in your hands, that's just really only the beginning of the process. Nothing is simple in this program. Nothing is simple about how the insurers are paid. Nothing is really simple about what they do.

And that's really why we called the series at some level Medicare Inc. Because people think, oh, this is a government program. But it's also a huge, huge, huge business for some of the biggest companies in America.

I'm Ana Wildey-Matthews.

And I cover health insurance for The Wall Street Journal.