All posts tagged "medicare"

They torpedoed Medicaid already. Is this precious program next?

Medicare turned 60 years old on Wednesday. Former U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law on July 30, 1965, giving seniors a guarantee of health coverage that never existed before. Prior to Medicare's enactment, it was nearly impossible for older people to obtain health insurance, as they were considered a "bad risk."

Medicare provides universal coverage to Americans over 65 years of age. The law created Medicare Part A as a national hospital insurance program. Part B is a voluntary program for doctor visits and other medical services. Medicare Part C is another name for the privatized, for-profit version of the program called "Medicare Advantage." And Part D is the prescription drug program enacted in 2003.

The Hospital Insurance portion is funded through workers' payroll contributions. At the signing ceremony in Independence, Missouri, LBJ said, "Through this new law, every citizen will be able, in their productive years when they are earning, to insure themselves against the ravages of illness in his old age."

Johnson paid tribute to former President Harry S. Truman, presenting him with the very first Medicare card. It was Truman who, 20 years earlier, had proposed a form of universal medical coverage for the American people.

LBJ quoted Truman's remarks from the 1940s:

Millions of our citizens do not now have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and to enjoy good health. Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. And the time has now arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and to help them get that protection.

It turned out that the time had not yet arrived. Truman's proposal failed to gain traction during a time of retrenchment from the expansions of the New Deal, and a Republican majority on Capitol Hill which he famously labeled the "Do-Nothing Congress."

President Johnson's determination to enact his Great Society agenda (of which Medicare was a large part) and sheer political muscle—not to mention solid Democratic control of Congress — pushed Medicare (and its sister program, Medicaid) into being.

Naturally, Medicare faced strong opposition from conservatives. None other than Ronald Reagan made the ludicrous prediction that if Medicare were enacted, "You and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free." Sixty years later, we are no less "free" because of Medicare. In fact, having guaranteed healthcare makes seniors and people with disabilities (and their families) much more free — from disease, from worry, and financial ruin.

Today, 68 million people rely on Medicare for health coverage, including 12 million who are dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid.

Medicare isn't perfect: The for-profit Medicare Advantage (Part C) program is extremely problematic (see below). The Medicare Part A trust fund will become depleted in 2033 if Congress fails to take action to strengthen it. Traditional Medicare still doesn't cover basic hearing, vision, and dental care — which we have been pushing for many years. But most concerning of all, President Donald Trump and his party have spent this 60th anniversary year actively undermining both Medicare and Medicaid.

The "Unfair, Ugly" bill that Trump signed earlier this month slashed nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid, which will strip health coverage from an estimated 10 to 16 million lower-income Americans. The new law — projected to add some $4 trillion to the national debt — could trigger cuts to Medicare down the road.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is recklessly taking steps to privatize the entire Medicare program. It has announced a pilot project to involve private companies in conducting prior authorizations for care in traditional Medicare. The administration, under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Director Mehmet Oz, also has announced a plan to automatically enroll new Medicare beneficiaries in the for-profit Medicare Advantage (MA) program — a huge gift to the multibillion-dollar insurance industry at the expense of patients.

The problems with Medicare Advantage (MA) have become legendary. Enrollees are basically put into health maintenance organizations run by insurance giants, with limited networks of providers. Unreasonable denials of care are rampant. Patients who become disenchanted with MA plans often find it nearly impossible to switch to traditional Medicare. Meanwhile, some MA Insurers have been overcharging the government for their services and ripping off taxpayers. (Several of these companies are currently under investigation.)

We are watching to see if the Trump administration, which talks a good game about lowering prescription medication costs while simultaneously doing favors for Big Pharma, will honor the provisions of President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, which made myriad patient-friendly reforms to the Part D drug program — including out of pocket caps for beneficiaries and empowering Medicare to negotiate prices with the industry.

The bottom line is: Let's not allow President Trump and congressional Republicans to shred one of the greatest legacies of LBJ's Great Society. We and our fellow advocacy groups are pushing back — and so is the grassroots "Hands Off" movement. But we don't want to be fighting this same battle every time Medicare (and Medicaid) mark an anniversary when we should be purely celebrating.

Max Richtman is president and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. He is former staff director at the United States Senate Special Committee on Aging.

'Activate our seniors': Lawmaker says Medicare cuts could be roped into GOP bill

Democrats need to shine a light on potential harm caused by Donald Trump's mega spending bill, a Democratic lawmaker said on Saturday.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) appeared on MSNBC over the weekend, where he warned all U.S. citizens about "devastating" impacts on the horizon due to the Republican spending priorities.

Krishnamoorthi said it's important to note, "There's also potentially cuts to Medicare that are about to happen."

This, according to the congressman, is because "of something called sequestration."

"The Congressional Budget Office has indicated that because the deficits and debt is going above a certain threshold, there may be automatic cuts to Medicare," he warned. "So we have to activate our seniors as well on this particular topic."

He added, "It will be malpractice if we don't."

"It's incumbent on us to shine a light on this harm," he said

Watch below or click here.

These morbidly rich babies suffer from mental illness — and there's a treatment

It happens every few generations. It’s what drove the fascist oligarchs of the Confederacy to reach out and try to conquer the entire United States in the 1860s. It caused the Robber Barons to murder union organizers and ultimately crash America into the Republican Great Depression in the early decades of the 20th century. And it’s why wages have been stagnant while billionaires’ wealth has exploded in the years since the Reagan Revolution.

What I’m talking about here is the rise of greedy oligarchs who are driven by an identifiable mental illness, what’s either a subset of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) or a defect in impulse control called Hoarding Syndrome.

Because most hoarders never invite people into their homes, it’s an almost invisible illness. But, as Drs. Randy Frost and Gail Steketee write in their book Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things:

“Recent studies of hoarding put the prevalence rate at somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of the population. That means that six million to 15 million Americans suffer from hoarding that causes them distress or interferes with their ability to live.”

That’s tough enough; people afflicted with hoarding syndrome are often tortured by their obsession and socially embarrassed to the point of removing themselves from all but the most essential social situations. They’re functionally invisible. But, from a societal point of view, they’re generally only harming themselves: hoarding syndrome is considered a psychiatric condition, not a crisis for democracy itself.

With one giant exception: morbidly rich people who are also afflicted with hoarding syndrome but don’t live in or even close to poverty.

When people with hoarding syndrome are born with or come into massive wealth, suddenly what was once a personal, psychiatric issue can become a crisis for all of society.

Like Scrooge McDuck of Disney comics fame, instead of filling their mansions with old newspapers, tin cans, and balls of string they obsessively fill their money bins, overseas bank accounts, and investment portfolios with billions of dollars.

And then, driven to continuously hoard more and more money — that now being the object of their addiction — they reach out to use the power of government itself to redirect more and more cash into their greedy hands.

As historian and political scientist Michael Parenti notes:

“Wealth becomes addictive. Fortune whets the appetite for still more fortune. There is no end to the amount of money one might wish to accumulate, driven onward by the auri sacra fames, the cursed hunger for gold.

“So the money addicts grab more and more for themselves, more than can be spent in a thousand lifetimes of limitless indulgence, driven by what begins to resemble an obsessional pathology, a monomania that blots out every other human consideration.”

It blots out their concern for their fellow humans. It blots out their willingness to take climate science seriously. It blots out their ability to see the damage they’re doing to their own country and its democratic institutions.

Ultimately, they don’t care about the damage they do to society; such considerations are overwhelmed by their obsession. They don’t care how many children must grow up in poverty or even die young to support their massive wealth. They don’t care about destroying everybody else’s future, so long as they can get more, more, more money!

We defeated Confederate oligarchs with this disease back in 1865. We beat money hoarders back again after the Republican Great Depression with FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. We thought we were safe, as the middle class grew from around 10 percent of us to around two-thirds of us (with a single paycheck!) by the late 1970s.

But then, in 1978, in the Bellotti decision written by “Powell Memo” author Lewis Powell himself, five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that money is actually “free speech” and corporations are “persons.” It floated Ronald Reagan into office in 1981 on a tsunami of oil and banking industry money. Five other corrupted SCOTUS Republicans doubled down on that bizarre ruling in 2010 with Citizens United, creating an entirely new form of corrupt political bribery via something they created out of thin air that are called SuperPACs.

As a result, today these morbidly rich hoarders shovel small amounts (millions) into the pockets of captured politicians who then provide them with tax breaks, profit-driving deregulation, and government subsidies that return billions to them. And the impact on average Americans over the past 47 years that we’ve been living in the Reagan Revolution has been dramatic.

While every other developed country in the world offers free or nearly free healthcare to its citizens, free or nearly free education including college, and almost universal unionization and a high minimum wage, we’re stuck living in the nation these billionaires have forced on us just to satisfy their own avaricious obsession with more, more, more money:

Almost 30 million Americans lack health insurance altogether, and 43 percent of Americans are so badly under-insured that any illness or accident costing them more than $1,000 in co-pays or deductibles would wipe them out.
Almost 12 percent of Americans, over 37 million of us, live in dire poverty, and 60% of us live in poverty, 201 million Americans. According to OECD numbers, while only 5 percent of Italians and 11 percent of Japanese workers toil in low-wage jobs, as CBS News reports, “For the bottom 60 percent of U.S. households, a minimal quality of life is out of reach.” (And low-income Japanese and Italians have free healthcare and college.)
More than one-in-five Americans — 21 percent — are illiterate. By fourth grade, a mere 35 percent of American children are literate at grade level, as our public schools have suffered from a sustained, four-decade-long attack by Republicans at both state and federal levels to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.
Fully a quarter of Americans (26 percent) suffer from a diagnosable mental illness in any given year: over half of them (54 percent) never receive treatment and, because of cost and a lack of access to mental health care, of the 46 percent who do get help, the average time from onset of symptoms to the first treatment is 11 years.
Every day in America an average of 316 people are shot and 110 die from their wounds. Gun violence is now the leading cause of death for American children, a situation not suffered by the children of any other country in the world.

And these are just the tip of the iceberg of statistics about how Americans suffer from Reagan’s 40-year-long GOP war on working-class and poor people that has managed to make America the nation with the world’s largest number of the world’s wealthiest billionaires.

Almost half (44 percent) of American adults carry student debt, a burden virtually unknown in any other developed country in the world (dozens of countries actually pay their young people to go to college).
Americans spend more than twice as much for healthcare and pharmaceuticals than citizens of any other developed country. We pay $11,912 per person per year for healthcare; it’s $5,463 in Australia, $4,666 in Japan, $5,496 in France, and $7,382 in Germany (the most expensive country outside of us).

And we don’t get better health or a longer lifespan for all the money; instead, it’s just lining the pockets of rich insurance, pharma, and hospital executives and investors, with hundreds of billions in profits every year going to the morbidly rich. “Dollar Bill” McGuire, the former CEO of UnitedHealth, for example, took over a billion dollars in compensation.

The average American life expectancy is 78.8 years: Canada is 82.3, Australia is 82.9, Japan is 84.4, France is 83.0, and Germany is 81.3.
Our public schools are an underfunded mess, as are our highways and public transportation systems. While every other developed country in the world has high-speed train service, we still suffer under a privatized rail system that prevents Amtrak from running even their most modern trains at anything close to their top speeds.

In the 42 years since the start of the Reagan Revolution, bought-off politicians have so altered our tax code that fully $51 trillion has moved from the homes and savings of working class Americans into the money bins of the morbidly rich money hoarders.

As a result, America today is the most unequal developed nation in the world and the situation gets worse every day: many of our billionaires are richer than any pharaoh or king in the history of the world, while a family lifestyle that could be comfortably supported by a single income in 1980 takes two people working full-time to maintain today.

In the years since the Court first began down this road in 1976, the GOP has come to be entirely captured by this handful of mentally ill billionaires and the industries that made them rich.

As a result, Republican politicians refuse to do anything about the slaughter of our schoolchildren with weapons of war; ignore or ridicule the damage fossil fuel-caused global warming is doing to our nation and planet; and continue to lower billionaire and corporate taxes every time they get full control of the federal or a state government.

All because our courts and politicians, now well-captured by rightwing billionaires, refuse to do anything about the ravages of hoarding syndrome among the very wealthy.

Solving this problem won’t be easy but also isn’t complicated. Just like we did with the Robber Barons, the first step is to identify and publicize the problem of mentally ill people among the morbidly rich having seized control of our political system.

We did this before.

As President Grover Cleveland — the only Democrat elected during that post-Civil War period — proclaimed in his 1887 State of the Union address:

“As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

And as FDR pointed out when he began to pull America out of the Republican Great Depression:

“For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things … It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself.”

FDR took on those “economic royalists” and defeated them. He explicitly called them out when the Democratic Party renominated him for president in 1936 in Philadelphia:

“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.

“Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!”

The crowd roared, delighted that he’d turned back the Republican Great Depression and put millions to work while undoing the climate-destroying Dust Bowl by creating, among other three-letter agencies, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to plant millions of trees across the country. And he raised the top tax rate on the obscenely wealthy back up to 90 percent, while stopping an effort to kidnap him and turn the government fascist.

“In vain, they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”

Cleveland’s and Roosevelt’s work now falls to us, as a new generation of obsessively money-hoarding Robber Barons have emerged from Reagan’s tax cuts and these horrible Supreme Court decisions. It’s thus now our job to educate the American people about the mental illness that’s frozen our economy and is dismantling our democracy.

Our task in this time of crisis is to create a societal consensus across America that we’re done indulging these wealthy pampered babies’ every desire, and begin the serious reforms necessary to put an end to this crisis and, like in the 1890s and 1930s, break up monopolies and raise their damn taxes so we can begin to pay down our nation’s debt and rebuild the middle class.

It’ll take a few years, in all probability, but it’s been done before. We can do it again.

Tag, we’re it! Spread the word…

Multiple Trump flip-flops leave House GOP facing 'political blowback': report

House Republicans figuring out how to pay for Donald Trump's "big, beautiful" spending bill are in a bind over whether the president will flip-flop on cutting entitlements, according to The New York Times.

So far, Trump has repeatedly claimed, “We’re not cutting Medicaid, we’re not cutting Medicare, and we’re not cutting Social Security."

He told NBC News last weekend that he would veto the bill “if they were cutting” Medicaid. “But they’re not cutting it. They’re looking at fraud, waste and abuse. And nobody minds that.”

Meddling with entitlements is considered the untouchable "third rail" of politics, but Republican lawmakers know from experience that Trump is liable to change course in an instant.

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"Mr. Trump is well known for abruptly changing his mind on major issues once his party has staked out a position, leaving Republican leaders and their rank-and-file members uncertain of where he might end up and whether they could find themselves locked into an untenable political position," The Times reported. "They are keenly aware of the potential political blowback that could come from slashing the government program that provides health coverage to tens of millions of Americans."

On another major issue to pay for the bill, hiking taxes on the wealthiest Americans, Trump posted ambiguously to social media Friday that "even a ‘TINY’ tax increase for the RICH” would give Democrats ammunition to use in the upcoming midterm elections. “In any event, Republicans should probably not do it, but I’m OK if they do!!!”

House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has vowed to pass the spending bill by the July 4 deadline, called the balancing act, "a sensitive thing."

He told reporters Thursday, “Look, our true and honest intention is to ensure that every Medicaid beneficiary who is in that traditional community of folks — you’re talking about young pregnant mothers and young single mothers and the elderly and disabled — those folks are covered, and no one loses their coverage.”

Read The New York Times article here.

$10M charity scandal could derail Casey DeSantis's bid for FL governor: analysis

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) had hoped to pass the gubernatorial baton to his wife, Casey DeSantis, when his full term runs out in 2027, describing her as the right person to take his accomplishments "to the next level.”

But an analysis piece in The Guardian suggested that a brewing financial scandal could derail the couple's plans of political dynasty and keep Casey DeSantis from even declaring her candidacy.

According to The Guardian, a charity Casey founded in 2021 called the Hope Florida Foundation with a mandate to reduce government funding for welfare programs has become "mired in controversy," as first reported by The Tampa Bay Times.

The Times found that the DeSantis administration "secretly directed $10m to the charity from a $67m overbilling settlement last year between the state’s agency for health care administration (AHCA) and the Medicare operator Centene. The direction was in apparent contradiction of Florida law requiring such money to be paid into a trust or act as general revenue for state legislators to spend."

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The Guardian quoted Frank Orlando, political science professor at St Leo University, who said "Casey DeSantis had essentially been caught up in the escalating dispute between her husband and state politicians, who are making hay from the Hope Florida situation."

Although the next steps for Florida's first lady are uncertain, The Guardian wrote that "some observers believe the controversy has ended any hope she had of becoming only the second woman, after Wyoming’s Nellie Tayloe Ross in 1925, to succeed her husband as a state governor."

But the negative publicity might not be a complete "death knell" for Casey's candidacy, according to Michael Binder, a political science professor at the University of North Florida.

Binder cited Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), "a Medicare embezzler" who won the governor’s race twice before being elected to the Senate. "So these things can pass," Binder said.

A poll conducted by Binder's department showed Casey DeSantis with a 30% approval rating overall, and a 57% approval rating among registered Republicans.

Read The Guardian's full article here.

'Even Trump knows it's big trouble': Commerce Secretary's statement lights up social media

Social media lit up Friday after President Donald Trump's commerce secretary Howard Lutnick made what some saw as insensitive comments about the hot-button topic of Social Security.

Everyone from average Americans to members of Congress have expressed fears that Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency is focusing in on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid as it continues to slash "waste, fraud, and abuse," from the federal government. Trump has insisted the entitlements won't be touched.

But the Trump administration recently made threats that could impact Social Security payments. Acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek, appointed under the Trump administration, suggested shutting down the Social Security Administration entirely in response to a federal judge's ruling that restricted access to sensitive SSA data by DOGE. Such a move could potentially delay or halt payments to millions of Americans who rely on Social Security benefits, including retirees, disabled individuals, and others.

Lutnick, a billionaire who recently gobsmacked conflict-of-interest watchdogs by promoting Musk's Tesla stock on Fox News, added to the controversy, telling the "All-In in DC!" podcast: "Let's say Social Security didn't send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who's 94, she wouldn't call and complain. She just wouldn't. She'd think something got messed up and she'll get it next month."

Social media critics were floored by his flippant remark.

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"Lutnick and Musk will high five this but even Trump knows it's big trouble," journalist John Harwood posted to X.

Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal posted, "Howard Lutnick says that if Social Security didn't send out a check one month, his mother-in-law wouldn't call in and complain, and then says that if you're the type who *would* whine loudly about such a thing, that's an indicator of being a fraudster."

"I assumed the tweet was going to be twisting his words a little, but no. This is maybe the worst political messaging I have ever seen," wrote reporter Jordan Weissmann.

"Narrator: But other complaints, millions of them, came in. And they haven't stopped," posted former CNN anchor Jim Acosta, while the conservative The Lincoln Project wrote, "WTF. This is insane. For so many seniors, there would be no money for food, rent, or prescriptions without their Social Security check. @howardlutnick says if they complain about missing a check, they're a fraudster."

On Bluesky, The Meidas Touch called Lutnick's comments "insane."

According to the National Institute on Retirement Security, some 40 percent of older Americans rely solely on Social Security for retirement income. The estimated average retirement benefit for January 2025 was $1,976, according to the Social Security Administration website.

Watch the clip below via the All-In in DC! podcast.

'Yes or no?' Senator forces Dr. Oz to confirm a product he pushed on TV was a sham

During his Senate confirmation hearing Friday, Dr. Mehmet Oz was pushed to agree that a "weight loss miracle" he once pushed on his widely-viewed television show was a sham.

Dr. Oz is a cardiothoracic surgeon who was "once known as America's Doctor," according to CNN's Dana Bash. He is President Donald Trump's pick to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees health coverage to more than 100 million people, according to the government website.

The department sits within the Department of Health and Human Services, now led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) asked him, "In 2012, you enthusiastically recommended several supplements for weight loss on your television show, including a substance called green coffee extract, which we now know was fraudulently marketed. For the record today, can you confirm that you no longer believe that green coffee extract is a miracle weight loss drug?"

Dr. Oz began, "I never said that that medication was a miracle weight loss drug. But I am very —"

Hassan interrupted to repeat, "Can you confirm that this was fraudulently marketed, and green coffee extract is not a miracle weight loss drug — yes or no?"

"Yes," Dr. Oz answered.

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CNN medical correspondent Meg Tirrell followed-up that it was Dr. Oz's history on the show that inspired Donald Trump to nominate him.

Tirrell added, "I talked with Andy Slavitt, who was in the same position in the Obama administration. He said he was a little skeptical before Dr. Oz called him after he was nominated. They now talk several times a week, Slavitt told me this morning. and he's really been won over by how he says, dr. oz is approaching this from a thoughtful, sort of humble position, trying to learn and coming into it in what Slavitt describes as really an apolitical, non-partisan position."

Dr. Oz ran as a Trump-backed Republican for one of Pennsylvania's Senate seats in 2022, but lost to now Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA).

Watch the clip via CNN below or click the link.