Whether you love Obamacare or hate Obamacare -- I, for one, would prefer single-payer, but recognize the value of incremental progress -- this move by the Obama administration should enrage anyone who believes in good and efficient governance.
Medicare has reversed proposed payment cuts to private heath plans in the popular Medicare Advantage program for the second straight year amid strong pushback from health insurers and Capitol Hill.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on Monday, after proposing in February a 1.9 percent cut to private plans, said government payments to insurers in the Medicare Advantage program will increase .4 percent on average in 2015. The increase, CMS said, is slightly higher than what insurers had requested.
"That gives us great confidence with this final rate structure we'll continue to see a strong program," said CMS principal deputy administrator Jonathan Blum.
The reversal comes after a major lobbying effort from the health insurance industry and signals that Republicans would use the cuts to attack Democrats in this year's midterm elections. The Medicare Advantage program, according to the Avalere Health consulting firm, now covers about 16 million seniors, or 30 percent of all Medicare beneficiaries, through private health plans that can offer extra benefits, like wellness plans.
The reason Obama -- and
Paul Ryan -- consistently proposed these cuts in the first place is because they do
not cut Medicare, but instead serve to chip away at the prodigious, huge, ginormous economic rent-seeking by private health insurers who operate so-called Medicare Advantage plans for seniors. In a nutshell, insurers are paid by the government
more than they need to be paid in order for insurers to pay the medical bills of seniors opting out of traditional Medicare -- about 30 percent of seniors -- and they get to keep all that extra money as profits to make fat cats on Wall Street happy. Obviously, the folks at Aetna and Humana -- represented by America's Health Insurance Plans, or AHIP -- were none too pleased.
America’s Health Insurance Plans, the nation’s largest industry group representing health insurers, ran an aggressive lobbying effort last year that helped turn a proposed 2.3 percent cut for 2014 Medicare Advantage plans into a 3.3 percent raise.
For the record, "Democrat" Chuck Schumer led the heroic battle for health insurance company shareholders.
About half of all the members of Congress, across party lines, raised concerns about the proposed cuts. A group of 40 Republican and Democratic senators, lead by Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), had called on CMS to maintain Medicare Advantage payment levels in 2015. Democrats had been especially fearful that the cuts would be used against vulnerable lawmakers in the November elections.
"In many parts of the country, including New York, Medicare Advantage works very well," Schumer said in a Monday evening statement. "They’ve shouldered their share already and this proposed cut would have been disproportionate, hurting seniors who would lose doctors or pay more. We’re glad the administration heeded our call and reversed the policy.”
Now, is this a disaster? Not really -- repealing Obamacare would be a disaster. Turning Medicare into a voucher program would be a disaster. This, however, is disgusting politics.
In a post-Obamacare era when America's bloated health care system -- representing nearly 20 percent of our GDP -- still forces individuals to put their health care -- even their premiums -- on a credit card, these kind of cynical and transparent giveaways to powerful financial interests (and, really, health insurers are nothing more than investment banks who gamble with your premium dollars and pay some medical bills when they feel like it) do nothing to structurally transform a broken system, or even set that system on a path towards a more reasonable future.
Today, we should be disappointed by Barack Obama's behavior. This was absolutely unnecessary. On April 15th, be aware -- just a little bit more of your hard-earned wages will be going to build the unearned wealth of these assholes.