by Marilyn Eisenberg
Many of us retired folks in the progressive community have signed in to the publicly funded traditional Medicare plan with or without supplements. Even though Medicare Advantage plans offer attractive perks to well retirees, we all know that for serious illnesses and injuries, these plans fall apart.
Medicare Advantage plans find devious ways of not covering the expenses they had promised, usually invoking the not-in-network excuses causing many ‘surprise’ bills to their hapless recipients.
But what you might not know is that the traditional Medicare that we have relied on for many years is being undercut by a plan initiated in the Trump presidency, but continuing under the Biden administration. The plan is called Direct Contacting Entities.
Without Congressional approval or oversight, it will slowly strip our Medicare of its public funding, and make it into a private profit-making insurance plan, much like our present private insurance companies and the assorted Medicare Advantage plans.
If you want to learn more about this outrage and what to do about it, follow the links below provided by Physicians for a National Healthcare Plan. This organization has already caught the attention of many Congress members and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra. But the practice persists, and unless the government takes swift action, our non-profit Medicare coverage will be gone by 2030.
Want to learn more about Medicare Direct Contracting? Visit <pnhp.org/StopDCEs>, where you’ll find:
- Fact sheet: Direct Contracting: Quietly Handing Medicare to Wall Street (one page)
- Policy primer: Medicare Direct Contracting Explained (four pages)
- Video: Dr. Ana Malinow explains Medicare Direct Contracting (15 minutes)
- PowerPoint: Direct Contracting: Handing Traditional Medicare to Wall Street