Posted on 10/25/2021 10:57:31 AM PDT by Kaslin
It's no surprise that someone who went out of his way to avoid paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in Medicare taxes would agree to jeopardize the Medicare coverage of 27 million beneficiaries.
Twelve months after Joe Biden claimed at the final presidential debate that “not one single person, private insurance, would lose their insurance under my [health] plan,” Democrats stand on the precipice of turning Biden’s statement into a reprise of Barack Obama’s “If you like your plan, you can keep it” Lie of The Year. The effort could cost millions of seniors their private Medicare plans, as Democrats raid one government program to create others.
With Democrats searching for politically acceptable ways to fund their multi-trillion-dollar spending spree, Medicare Advantage, the program in which private insurers provide Medicare benefits to seniors, appears on the table for cuts. Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, recently confirmed this fact to Politico; the outlet quotes potential reductions as high as “the low hundreds of billions of dollars.”
The effort could gut a program that has skyrocketed in popularity. Over the past decade, Medicare Advantage enrollment has grown in both absolute and relative terms, reaching an estimated 27.4 million seniors this year. By the end of the decade, the Medicare actuary projects that nearly half of all seniors will enroll in MA.
Seniors enroll in Medicare Advantage for the program’s better benefits. At a time when Democrats want to expand traditional Medicare to include dental, vision, and hearing benefits, the overwhelming share of private Medicare plans already cover these services.
A recent survey found that only 6 percent of Medicare Advantage enrollees lack dental benefits, only 3 percent lack hearing benefits, and a mere 1 percent lack vision coverage. Some seniors do pay deductibles and co-payments for this coverage, but out-of-pocket costs are roughly 20 percent lower for Medicare Advantage enrollees than those in traditional Medicare.
Rather than cutting Medicare Advantage, Democrats should instead harness its consumer-oriented approach to make Medicare more sustainable. In 2017, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that one proposal giving seniors a fixed contribution to select from private or public Medicare plans would save taxpayers $184 billion over ten years, while also reducing seniors’ total out-of-pocket spending by 5 percent.
Of course, this type of proposal wouldn’t accomplish the twin goals of Democrats’ Medicare Advantage cuts—driving more individuals into government-run care, while also raiding the Medicare “piggy bank” to fund new entitlements. The current reconciliation bill would follow in the footsteps of Obamacare, which directly reduced Medicare Advantage spending by $156 billion, along with additional indirect cuts to the program. Just as Obamacare reduced Medicare spending by a total of $716 billion to pay for its entitlements, so too do Democrats want to use Medicare to fund the “free” programs in their latest spending spree.
His age notwithstanding, the septuagenarian Biden has already demonstrated himself no friend to seniors. Recall that from 2017 through 2019, Biden and his wife Jill used a questionable tax loophole—one his own Treasury Department admits allows people like Biden “to avoid paying their fair share”—to dodge nearly $392,000 in Medicare taxes, along with an additional $121,000 in payroll taxes imposed by Obamacare.
Seniors therefore shouldn’t be surprised that someone who went out of his way to avoid paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in Medicare taxes would agree to provisions jeopardizing the Medicare coverage of 27 million beneficiaries. But as Biden himself might say, to those beneficiaries, that’s a big f-cking deal.
F**k Joe Biden
The heck with it all. I am late middle age, and not at all wealthy, but I would rather just chuck the whole thing and live until I die from a disease or accident even if a subsidy would “save” me, when the trade-off is self-determination. And I am not even a libertarian.
The TOTALLY CORRUPT Biden family machine never stops.
Joe’s handlers have a conundrum - retirees vote, but it’s otherwise a demographic they would love to screw over (too many elderly white people) and throw the money at all the illegals they’re importing.
Give me new glasses every year and a rear molar and you got my vote. Sorry, but at least I’m honest.
For those who don’t know, Medicare Advantage plans pretty much replace Medicare parts A & B and any Medical Supplement plans. They are very popular because many/most of them cost you nothing out of pocket. And they offer benefits that regular Medicare does not such as dental coverage, etc.
But if you are enrolled, you are pretty much at the mercy of the insurance company that issues them. Trips to specialists must be approved. You are confined to using certain doctors, etc.
You might be but don't know it.
Our plan is quite generous. Yes, our advantage plan is an HMO, but we don’t have to get approval to see a specialist, and all the doctors we have ever wanted to visit are on our plan. We are extremely satisfied with it and have had this plan for 4 or 5 years. It does include dental, but we have our own dental insurance apart from that, because I’m not keen on any of the dentists on the plan’s list. Eyeglasses and hearing aids are covered, or at least most of the cost. Our plan seems to get better every year.
If you go to the government Medicare website, they have customer ratings for the Advantage plans in your area.
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