the US is no country for old men

This a good point... it is an opinion piece and the authors emotional reaction to her family's experience with this system. There are some stats but a more useful artical would be a fact based exploration of the abuses by insurance companies that are enabled from the inherent structure of Medicare Advantage plans.

My own anecdotal experience is how the insurance companies call the elderly (prey on the elderly - abusive practice) to schedule vists from nurses who do nothing more than ask 100's of invasive questions and provide 0 care. They are simply collecting data that is not protected by HIPPA. The data is immensely profitable to the insurance companies to drive the accuracy of their predictive models. The insurance companies then in turn charge CMS for this visit.