The right-wing policy agenda written for a new Donald Trump presidency would “greatly accelerate” efforts to privatize Medicare
Last year, for the first time ever, a majority of Americans eligible for Medicare were on privatized Medicare Advantage plans. If Republicans win the presidential race this year, the push to fully privatize Medicare, the government health insurance program for seniors and people with disabilities, will only intensify.
Conservative operatives have already sketched out what the GOP’s policy agenda would look like in the early days of a new Donald Trump presidency. As Rolling Stone has detailed, the proposed Project 2025 agenda is radically right-wing. One item buried in the 887-page blueprint has attracted little attention thus far, but would have a monumental impact on the health of America’s seniors and the future of one of America’s most popular social programs: a call to “make Medicare Advantage the default enrollment option” for people who are newly eligible for Medicare.
Such a policy would hasten the end of the traditional Medicare program, as well as its foundational premise: that seniors can go to any doctor or provider they choose. The change would be a boon for private health insurers — which generate massive profits and growing portions of their revenues from Medicare Advantage plans — and further consolidate corporate control over the United States health care system.
May they all fall off a ladder while trying to hang a photo of the family who doesn’t visit them anymore and then die slowly of dehydration on the floor with a broken pelvis.
Quit fucking with people’s healthcare!
But there are profits to be made? The suffering is a feature if you’re sociopathic.
More Republican death panels
It’s always projection with Republicans…
It is grotesque. Vile, really. Fucking morbid.
It’s less of a panel and more of a rubber stamp
Has privatizing ever worked out in the favor of the general public?
Also, I still feel like republicans are an existential threat. We should treat them as such, and not like “oh well it’s just a difference of opinion and if they vote to kill me I guess that’s fine.”
Has privatizing ever worked out in the favor of the general public?
Depends on your definition. To a very large extent so much of the government is. Your city government isn’t developing their own OS or fabricating their own metal parts.
Less pedantically I think you mean “has there been a role that was traditionally done by civil servants that was handed over to private sector and things got better as a whole?”. It is a good question the only thing I can think of is some local government maintenance stuff is done that way. My city for example and our neighbor has the same night contractor for emergency repairs. I have worked with them a few times and they do alright, most of them are semi-retired.
Has privatizing ever worked out in the favor of the general public?
Nope. Never.
Healthcare? Probably not. Privitization got us to it current CPU and GPUs though. Price gouging aside, they are quite the spectacle of tech.
So something I’ve been wondering about lately, on one hand capitalism coincides with most modern advancements, but is that a case of cause or just a case of happening to be around at the same time? Especially when capitalism is being propped up by a lot of what is essentially targeted socialism these days.
You are only wondering that because you don’t spend all day dealing with government contracts. It is night and day how slow government can be to adapt. I will name my next ulcer “government”. Work so fucking hard on some of them just trying to inch them forward I want to cry. And no it is not just the US. It is freaken everywhere.
I personally think the free market works best and is best when it is has strict boundaries to play in.
When I came to my employer we made effectively every penny from government contracts. I was one of the people brought on so we could expand into private sector. That was right when the virus happened. In 3 years our private sector stuff hardly even resembles the government stuff internally, same basic functionality. One is advancing and the other is stuck in the early 90s.
Marx once thought that capitalism was needed for industrialization before transitioning to the next stage of human development (socialism), but I think he changed his opinion later.
I personally think there would be much more innovation in a more socialist society with UBI or UBS (universal basic services) because people should generally have more time to get educated and work on risky ideas instead of working on assembly lines for 60+ hours/week just to take care of their families.
Was there a point where computer hardware was nationalized? A quick search made it look like it was never a government run monopoly. It was universities and then private
The sad thing here is that the Democrats will let them. Because they still think they get bonus points for playing the game by the rules only they follow.
Right now, the GOP nominee-presumptive is a piece of trash rapist, an Insurrectionist asshole who got hundreds of thousands of Americans dead. Man who is facing over 90 felony indictments, many of which are related to keeping (and let’s be honest, selling,) extremely sensitive materials.
Yet this asshole still walks free because to put him where he belongs would be political.
In case you’re wondering, this is why we’re fucked.
I love how you open with ‘this horrible thing being planned and pushed into existence by the republican party is AHCTUALLY the Democrats fault for allowing it’
If it’s so easy why don’t you stop the republicunts?
I didn’t say that.
I said the democrats won’t stop them.
I love how you totally don’t actually argue against any of that.
I can be angry that some one is an insurrectionist asshole, I can also be angry that the government hasnt locked said insurrectionist asshole up.
I can be angry that the assholes are trying to fuck over Americans. I can also be angry that the dems aren’t doing enough to stop it. I’m not saying it’s easy, I’m saying it’s necessary.
Oh, and i can’t stop them. Not alone. I’m one person, and certainly not a billionaire; and in any case the powers that are would never let me near federal office.
Democrats just went and let oj kill his wife too.
This morning I dropped my toast and the fucking Democrats just let it slide. What pricks.
So the plan is to allow it because fighting against it is hard?
Democrats are really scraping the bottom of the barrel with this “we’re less terrible than them” attitude.
Do better.
You are building a massive strawman here. You are the one claiming that Democrats won’t stop them, even though they absolutely will if able to.
Do better
I mean I have thought about it but honestly my sex life with my wife is totally dead and passionless and the only thing that gets me going anymore is being condescending towards progressives who have the nerve to try to change the world for better.
I don’t mean to be such a wet blanket, but you have to understand I don’t have anything else. Plus if I admitted progressives were right that would put my entire world view into question and honestly I am too old to be an evolving person with views that change and grow. Why do I, ME, have to KEEP changing my views, can’t the world just settle on a status quo and just keep it that way? It stresses me out and I don’t think minorities are thinking about that stress when they push for progressive societal change that benefits all.
In the same way that you would find it hard to jump into a cold lake, a world where other people are treated as equal to white men (me) is like jumping into a cold lake. You can judge me for endorsing structural violence and racism but the water is just so cold and no one cares about my feelings. I’m not used to having feelings, I am a man stranded in a terrifying and strange landscape and I need desperate people fighting for their lives and their loved one’s lives to just slowwww down and be more patient while I tip toe in.
I am not racist but
Well it’s all your fault for allowing Democrats to be that way. It doesn’t matter if you protest or don’t vote for idiots. You did this and we all blame you despite spending years of your life fighting against it.
(Do you see how insane this sounds?)
Well… looks like a lot more people are going to be working until their 80s so they’ll have health insurance.
See that’s actually all wrong. We’re going to need fewer people working with increasing automation. We’re just going to have an “unfortunate” situation where people who cannot work ALSO cannot afford to stay alive.
We’ll have 80 year olds that just die and gosh if there was only something we could of done to save them. Tots and pears.
We could use them as a cheap source of aquarium gravel?
They will be “working” as Walmart greeters amongst other demeaning jobs.
They’ve been planning this for 40 years
So the boomers who have been holding back progress on healthcare will soon be stuck in the same boat as everyone else? They will no longer be able to say “got mine” before “fuck you”?
Maybe we’ll get something that works for everyone out of the backlash, instead of something that only helps boomers.
Does not change anything for people currently on Medicare or people who don’t just take the default option when given a choice.
So it just makes things worse for everyone younger than a boomer?
That tracks.
Medicare advantage is some bullshit I do not understand why people sign up for it, I guess it’s great if you never have to use it.
A lot of the elderly don’t realize they’ve signed up for medicare advantage.
I worked for a drug company giving free money to patients who had insurance but still couldn’t afford the drug (that’s more profitable than charging a sane price in the first place).
It was routine to hear elderly patients saying the insurance told them they were re-signing up for medicare + a medicare supplemental when they’d been switched to a medicare advantage plan with a deductible and a lower coverage percentage.
That is scary AF!!
Yep. If you live in the US and have elderly family members, it’s important to be aware of and involved in their healthcare/insurance stuff. Siphoning off the life savings of dying boomers is BIG business.
They sign up for it because the advertising is insidious. My family member signed up for it because it used the name of a well-known doctor’s group in the area. Sure, they have a deal with said doctor’s group, but it is no better than having the entire field available that medicare would have given.
I see advertising claiming all sorts of token “benefits” you’re missing out on if only you call and “review your coverage”
It’s like Republicans want Joe Biden to win lmao
Old people don’t have this info
Isnt this the stuff old people watch out for the most? Same thing with the nursing homes that depend on that insurance money right?
Depends. Is that old person a fascist cultist, then they won’t. Is that old person not a fascist, then there is a high chance of them having this info. It is not the age of the person, but who that person is which matters in this context.
Young gen z fascists won’t have this info either.
The Repugnantcon Betrayal will not be televised.
A good read about the Democrats and why they losed to the profit of the extrem right is Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism by Stephanie L. Mudge.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
If Republicans win the presidential race this year, the push to fully privatize Medicare, the government health insurance program for seniors and people with disabilities, will only intensify.
Philip Verhoef, president of the single-payer advocacy group Physicians for a National Health Program, tells Rolling Stone it would be “disastrous” to make Medicare Advantage the default enrollment option.
As The New York Times reported in 2018, during Medicare’s open enrollment period, the Trump administration emailed messages to millions of beneficiaries touting the private plans.
Trump’s administration also helped make Medicare Advantage more attractive by expanding the range of perks the plans can offer to enrollees, allowing them to add benefits such as transportation to doctors’ offices and meal delivery.
Medicare Advantage plans, he says, are “tasked with managing your care, and telling you what you can and can’t do, and what is and is not covered — that is the opposite of putting beneficiaries in control of how they spend their dollars.”
But the financial incentive to deny care is baked into the Medicare Advantage model: The private plans are given a fixed amount of money every month to provide coverage for each enrollee; paying out fewer dollars means extra profit.
The original article contains 1,164 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 83%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
BEEN planning.
They are like a flesh eating octopus that escaped its containment.
Yay. More healthcare I can’t afford.
Where was the urgency when Obama, Trump, and now Biden pushed to privatize? They are all complicit in the majority of current Medicare recipients being enrolled in privatized care. Trump accelerated it, then Biden took the ball and ran with it
