Medicare is America's government-run health care plan.

It provides care for anyone's 65 and over and some people with disabilities.

But what a lot of people may not realize is that a majority of those on Medicare get it through a program called Medicare Advantage.

Yeah, there's more than 60 million people in Medicare, and more than half of those are in Medicare Advantage at this point.

And the thing about Medicare Advantage is that the plans are paid for by the government, but managed by private insurance companies.

Medicare Advantage is sort of dominated by these huge insurance companies like United

Health Group, Humana, Edna, and Elevance.

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 Chris Weaver.

I'm Anna Wildy Matthews.

I'm an investigative reporter at the Wall Street Journal.

And I cover health insurance for the Wall Street Journal.

My colleagues, Anna and Chris, have been investigating the Medicare Advantage program for over a year.

So when you and the team looked into the program, what did you find?

What we found was that Medicare Advantage insurers were basically gaming the system to get paid billions of dollars more.

And at the same time, creating barriers to accessing care.

Over the next two episodes, we'll lay out some of what the journal's investigative reporting

team found.

Today is about how insurers use questionable practices to profit off of the Medicare system.

...