Medicare

Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful’ Cuts To Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid And More

May 28, 2025 Louisiana Workers Council, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Budget Cuts, Congress, Health Care, Medicaid, Medicare, Trump Administration

The MAGA movement claims to support health care for vulnerable Americans, but their budget tells a different story. 13.7 million people will lose Medicaid — nearly 1 in 5 current enrollees. Nationally, 72 million rely on Medicaid, including 1.6 million in Louisiana and 180,000 in New Orleans. Another 500,000 low-income Louisianans get subsidized ACA coverage. Everyone on Medicaid or ACA plans will suffer from these cuts. This isn’t “saving money” — it’s a war on the poor, sick, and vulnerable. Millions will suffer, hospitals will close, and families will be bankrupted — all to fund tax cuts for the wealthy. These cuts are cruelty by design.

Thousands March In Manhattan Against MAGA Cuts

March 18, 2025 G. Dunkel, Workers World. Resist! Donald Trump, Medicaid, Medicare, New York City (NYC), Social Security

From New York’s City Hall to Bowling Green, the march stretched from curb to curb in Manhattan on March 15, behind a lead banner that read “Stand with workers. Stop the cuts.” Among the thousands who marched, many held signs opposing Trump’s attacks on Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. The protest represented a broad coalition with significant union participation, notably from the Laborers, Service Employees Union (SEIU), Communications Workers of America (CWA), American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) and Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) of the American Federation of Teachers Local 2334.

Elon Musk’s DOGE ‘Proud Boys’ Blitzkrieg Of Government Offices For Personal Data Of All US Citizens

February 3, 2025 Colonel (Ret) Ann Wright, Popular Resistance. Educate! DOGE, Elon Musk, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, Trump Administration, US Treasury Department

In raids reminiscent of the “January 6” Proud Boys attack on the U.S. Capitol four years ago, unelected, unvetted and without federal government security clearance, the Trump anointed head of the yet unapproved Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Elon Musk and his henchmen with enormous computing background are wrecking havoc in government offices with sensitive personal data of all U.S. citizens. This past week, Musk’s blitzkrieg team gained access to sensitive Treasury data including Social Security and Medicare customer payment systems.

Improved Medicare For All Can Heal This Sick Country

January 18, 2025 Kay Tillow, Judy Albert, Claire M. Cohen, Ed Grystar and Ana Malinow, Common Dreams. Organize! Health Care, Medicare, Medicare for all, Single-Payer

It’s the beginning of the end for corporate control of health care. The tsunami of outrage against the health insurance industry in the wake of the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, can propel an urgent, unyielding demand for the removal of profit from healthcare and the enactment of a universal, national single payer system. That is, if the single payer, Medicare for All, national health service movement can summon the vision and audacity to rise to the occasion.

Medicare ‘Advantage’ By The Numbers

November 16, 2024 Adam Fishbein, Center for Economic and Policy Research. Educate! Health Care, Medicare, Medicare Advantage, Privatization

The quasi-privatized system called “Medicare Advantage,” otherwise known as Part C, was created in 2003 as a means of expanding the role of private sector corporations in the publicly-funded Medicare system. Proponents claimed it would lower costs and improve health care for seniors. It has achieved neither of those goals; instead, MA has become a wildly profitable scheme for private insurance giants, who have become adept at taking advantage of Medicare’s billing model to claim exorbitant profits. At this point, MA is more profitable for many companies than their conventional insurance businesses.

New York City Teacher Retirees Save Their Medicare

July 23, 2024 Jenny Brown, Labor Notes. Resist! Health Care, Medicare, Medicare Advantage, New York City (NYC), Retirees, Unions, Victory

The dissident Retiree Advocate caucus in the giant New York City teachers union won a decisive victory over the incumbents in the retiree chapter election June 14, winning 63 percent of the 27,000 votes cast. Turnout jumped compared to previous elections. In addition to running the 70,000-member Retired Teachers Chapter, they will send 300 delegates to the union’s delegate assembly. The leadership of the union got the message and abruptly dropped its support for Medicare Advantage, after three years of vigorously campaigning to impose a for-profit plan on 250,000 city retirees to save money for city officials.

Medicare Dis-Advantage: Overpayments And Inequity

July 2, 2024 Adam Gaffney, David U. Himmelstein, and Steffie Woolhandler, Portside. Educate! Health Care, Medicare, Medicare Advantage, Privatization

Medicare Advantage—the privatized Medicare plans run by insurance firms but funded by the federal government—rips off taxpayers. On this there is little controversy. In March, MedPAC, Congress’s nonpartisan advisory board on Medicare policy, estimated that this year alone taxpayers will overpay Medicare Advantage plans by $83 billion—the savings to Medicare if all of those plans’ enrollees were instead covered by the traditional, fully public Medicare program. A 2022 New York Times exposé, “’The Cash Monster Was Insatiable’: How Insurers Exploited Medicare for Billions,” lays out the gory mechanisms—like fraudulent schemes (known as “upcoding”) to make patients look sicker on paper, which ups payouts from the government.

Insurgent Slate Wins UFT Retiree Chapter Election

June 20, 2024 Crystal Lewis, Portside. Organize! Education, Health Care, Medicare, Retirees, Teachers, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

In a significant setback to the union’s leadership, former educators with the Retiree Advocate caucus of the United Federation of Teachers have ousted the incumbent Unity slate. In balloting for leadership of the union’s Retired Teachers chapter, the Retiree Advocate slate received 17,226 votes, or 63 percent of the total, while Unity, which is aligned with UFT President Michael Mulgrew, got 10,114 votes, according to unofficial results. Members of the Retiree Advocate had campaigned in opposition to the city’s efforts to switch retired city workers to a Medicare Advantage plan from their traditional Medicare. The plan is backed by the Municipal Labor Committee, of which Mulgrew is the executive vice-chair.

Mayor Adams Keeps Pushing Medicare Advantage Despite Latest Court Defeat

May 24, 2024 Joe Maniscalco, Work Bites. Educate! Eric Adams, Legal System, Medicare, New York City (NYC), Retirees, Teachers

The City of New York’s decision to keep trying to push 250,000 municipal retirees into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage health insurance plan after yet another crushing court defeat on Tuesday has convinced many in the fight that Mayor Eric Adams and his privatization allies must be crazy. “Yesterday was a great day. Retirees won our case again,” retired public school teacher and Cross-Union Retirees Organizing Committee [CROC] member Sarah Shapiro told Work-Bites. “After spending two months deliberating, the court came down with a ruling in our favor. Yet, the city still vows to appeal again. Will the mayor and our union misleaders in the Municipal Labor Committee [MLC] ever learn? Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome—these guys are insane! We vow to keep fighting!”

Retired New York City Teachers Rise And Run

May 21, 2024 Jenny Brown, Labor Notes. Strategize! Healthcare, Medicare, New York (NY), New York City (NYC), Retirees, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

They’ve really stepped in it. The incumbent Unity Caucus that runs the huge teachers union in New York City is facing a challenge from the Retiree Advocate slate who hope to take leadership of the powerful 70,000-person retiree chapter within the union. Ballots were mailed May 10 and will be counted June 14. The rallying issue has been the United Federation of Teachers’ collusion with the city to put municipal retirees, including retired teachers, into a for-profit Medicare Advantage plan run by Aetna. The plan would replace their traditional Medicare, which is provided premium-free along with a cost-free wraparound.

Progressives Must Put Medicare For All Back On The Agenda

May 2, 2024 Ana Malinow, Common Dreams. Organize! Congress, Health Care, Medicare, Medicare for all

In May 2009, Dr. Margaret Flowers, renowned single payer activist and humanist, was one of 13 single payer activists, doctors, and nurses arrested at one of the Senate Finance Committee meetings, chaired by then-Senator Max Baucus (D-Mont.), charged with reforming the U.S. health care system. The committee heard from 28 witnesses over two days representing major health care stakeholders. Missing from the lineup was even one witness in support of the obvious solution, single payer health care. As activists were hauled out of the hearing by police, one of them could be heard saying, “Why aren’t single payer activists at the table?”

Half Of Rural Hospitals Are Operating At A Loss

April 16, 2024 Jazmin Orozco Rodriguez, In These Times. Educate! Health Care, Hospitals, Medicaid, Medicare, Montana, North Carolina, Report, rural communities

In a little more than two years as CEO of a small hospital in Wyoming, Dave Ryerse has witnessed firsthand the worsening financial problems eroding rural hospitals nationwide. In 2022, Ryerse’s South Lincoln Medical Center was forced to shutter its operating room because it didn’t have the staff to run it 24 hours a day. Soon after, the obstetrics unit closed. Ryerse said the publicly owned facility’s revenue from providing care has fallen short of operating expenses for at least the past eight years, driving tough decisions to cut services in hopes of keeping the facility open in Kemmerer, a town of about 2,400 in southwestern Wyoming.

The UAW’s 2028 National Strike Should Center Medicare For All

April 1, 2024 Jonathan Michels and Will Cox, Jacobin. Strategize! Auto Workers, General Strike 2028, Health Care, Medicare, Unions, United Auto Workers (UAW), Worker Rights and Jobs

The United Auto Workers (UAW) are laying the groundwork for workers across multiple sectors to join them in a general strike on International Workers Day, May 1, 2028. UAW president Shawn Fain’s call to utilize labor power — four hundred thousand working members and six hundred thousand retirees make up the UAW alone — for the “good of the entire working class” is a major departure from business-as-usual unionism and represents a potential game changer for social movements to secure public goods, including Medicare for All, that extend beyond the shop floor.

How Medicare Advantage Care Denials Affect Patients

March 7, 2024 Matthew Cunningham-Cook , Portside. Educate! Health Care, Medicare, Profiteers, UnitedHealthcare

In 2023, insurance behemoth UnitedHealth spent $8 billion buying back its stock to juice its stock price—and its executive compensation, which is tied to the company’s stock price. It spent 39% more on stock buybacks in 2023 than in 2022. In 2023, it also spent $6.7 billion on dividend payments—a 10% jump from the prior year. The company’s CEO, Sir Andrew Witty, pulled in nearly $21 million in 2022—a 13% hike from 2021. (His compensation for 2023 hasn’t been disclosed yet.) Also in 2023, UnitedHealth spent $10.76 million lobbying Congress.

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