{"id":98576,"date":"2023-12-14T19:28:29","date_gmt":"2023-12-15T01:28:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=98576"},"modified":"2023-12-14T19:28:29","modified_gmt":"2023-12-15T01:28:29","slug":"98576","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=98576","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Lefty Pseudo-Think Tank Attacks Medicare Advantage In Effort to Push Americans Toward Medicare-For-All<\/a><\/p>\n

The annual open enrollment period for Medicare Advantage passed just about a week ago, and as it did, an interesting thing happened: A benign and very academic- and intellectual-sounding group called the\u00a0Center for Economic Policy and Research pushed out a negative piece about Medicare Advantage<\/a>. The report was written back in September before the open enrollment period began (and ended)\u2014but it managed to get a write-up just as the open enrollment period closed\u2014which is curious if the point of the report was to inform consumers before they made their enrollment decision.<\/p>\n

Even more curious is who funds the Center for Economic Policy and Research, given what the Center has to say. Although\u00a0Medicare Advantage is hugely popular with senior citizens<\/a>\u00a0and should be with taxpayers, given that it is a\u00a0big cost-saver<\/a>\u00a0over traditional Medicare<\/a>, the Center for Economic Policy and Research really, really dislikes it. Really, really, really.<\/p>\n

And the Center really, really, really likes traditional fee-for-service Medicare\u2014you know, the thing that progressives are trying to establish as the health care system for all Americans in the wake of Obamacare turning out to be a disaster and other efforts at health care reform stalling out. It turns out that the donor list for the Center is a veritable who\u2019s who of big lefty foundations. Here’s a screenshot of their current\u00a0donor list<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A few names will immediately jump out at conservatives, starting with the National Education Association. That\u2019s the biggest teachers\u2019 union in the country.<\/p>\n

Less known, but even more important names are the Tides Foundation and the Bernard & Anne Spitzer Family Charitable Trust.<\/p>\n

Tides has, over the years, taken donations from a\u00a0bevy of lefty donors<\/a>\u00a0perhaps most famously including Barbra Streisand<\/a>; it\u00a0had over $1.4 billion in assets in 2022<\/a>. Another big backer has been\u00a0George Soros<\/a>, who, coincidentally,\u00a0has also donated to the Center<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But what is the Bernard & Anne Spitzer Family Charitable Trust? I\u2019m glad you asked.\u00a0It turns out it\u2019s the family trust established by Eliot Spitzer\u2019s parents (yes,\u00a0that<\/em>\u00a0Eliot Spitzer)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When you consider the donors, it\u2019s unsurprising that the Center would be advocating for a policy position that shuts down a private alternative to Medicare; what progressives want is to push more Americans into Medicare and ultimately, enact Medicare-for-All\u2014or at least a \u201cpublic option,\u201d which would probably lay the foundation for Medicare-for-All to be enacted\u2014nationwide.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is not likely to happen while seniors keep choosing Medicare Advantage (and\u00a0a majority of them do<\/a>) and while public officials keep backing it because they know that Medicare Advantage is\u00a0better for taxpayers<\/a>\u00a0in a time of high debt and deficits. But that\u2019s what the left wants, so intellectual- and academic-sounding reports going after Medicare Advantage funded by the left will continue to crop up.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s perhaps most interesting here is how healthcare providers\u2014think big hospital systems\u2014seem to be lining up with the left on this issue.<\/p>\n

During the open enrollment period, there was a massive uptick in\u00a0articles<\/a>\u00a0covering<\/a>\u00a0hospital systems\u2019<\/a>\u00a0displeasure<\/a>\u00a0with Medicare Advantage because purportedly Medicare Advantage plans pay health care providers,\u00a0who we have recently learned did not in fact do financially badly at all out of the pandemic<\/a>, \u201ctoo little\u201d as compared to traditional fee-for-service Medicare. What this actually means is that providers prefer the option that pays them more\u2014traditional Medicare\u2014even though that payment mechanism is entirely taxpayer-funded, and does little to limit cost (why the providers like it).<\/p>\n

Traditional Medicare is what is driving debt and deficits and proving financially unsustainable. Per\u00a0Money<\/a>, “Medicare trustees say the Part A program will begin running deficits again in 2025, drawing down the trust fund until it depletes in 2031. After that date, the program would not be bringing in enough money to fully pay out Part A benefits.”<\/p>\n

At the same time, Medicare Advantage is offering seniors\u2014and taxpayers\u2014an alternative that preserves healthcare access while\u00a0affording additional benefits traditional Medicare does not provide<\/a>\u2014but makes the math work by having healthcare provider networks. That is not what hospital systems want, and it is not what the left wants\u2014even though in vastly more socialized healthcare systems than the US (take the United Kingdom, for example<\/a>) costs are absolutely minimized by limiting patients\u2019 access to rearms of healthcare providers.<\/p>\n

Republicans lately have seemed to be more susceptible to arguments driven by hospitals and by academic, intellectual-sounding arguments from the likes of the Center for Economic Policy and Research, that maybe Medicare Advantage isn\u2019t actually advantageous over traditional fee-for-service Medicare. This is a major reversal from the era when the GOP was committed to fighting Obamacare because, among other things, it cut Medicare Advantage\u2014which amounted to cutting Medicare for a ton of beneficiaries. A little caution might be warranted here, considering the very lefty philosophical and hardened financial interests at play in this debate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lefty Pseudo-Think Tank Attacks Medicare Advantage In Effort to Push Americans Toward Medicare-For-All The annual open enrollment period for Medicare Advantage passed just about a week ago, and as it did, an interesting thing happened: A benign and very academic- and intellectual-sounding group called the\u00a0Center for Economic Policy and Research pushed out a negative piece … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-goobermint","category-health-medicine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=98576"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98577,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98576\/revisions\/98577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=98576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=98576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=98576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}