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John,
In 1995, newly-elected Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich had a dream: To destroy Medicare.
The problem he saw was that, unlike him and his Wall Street donors, people on Medicare liked their Medicare plans, and didn’t want to see them destroyed.
Newt Gingrich hatched a plan, which is coming to fruition a quarter-century later. Social Security Works is mobilizing to stop it. Can you chip in $7 today to save Medicare from Wall Street greed?
Gingrich’s plan was to create a system that would let private, profit-driven insurers get their foot in the door. They would use advertising budgets, false claims, and an expanded array of services like dental and vision insurance unavailable to traditional Medicare to lure people away from Medicare into privatized plans. Then, Gingrich told a Blue Cross/Blue Shield conference, he believed Medicare would “wither on the vine.”1
Today, Medicare is at a tipping point. Privatized plans that call themselves Medicare Advantage now control 51% of all Medicare plans2―and more than 25 years after Gingrich’s plan became law, we’ve got data that shows that privatized Medicare plans cost more and deliver worse health outcomes than the traditional Medicare plans they ‘competed’ with.3
Why do people choose privatized Medicare over traditional Medicare? Because private health care plans bombard them with advertising and prevent people from making choices armed with the facts about the delays and denials they will experience. They promise lower costs to the consumer, along with added benefits that Medicare isn’t allowed to offer. The truth is, privatized Medicare plans don’t just cost more―they actively steal, to the tune of $75 billion in overpayments this year alone.4
President Franklin Roosevelt saw this attack coming in 1936, and tried to warn us about politicians like Newt Gingrich:5
Let me warn you and let me warn the Nation against the smooth evasion which says, "Of course we believe all these things; we believe in social security; we believe in work for the unemployed; we believe in saving homes. Cross our hearts and hope to die, we believe in all these things; but we do not like the way the present Administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us. We will do all of them―we will do more of them we will do them better; and, most important of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything."
Remember, too, that the first essential of doing a job well is to want to see the job done. Make no mistake about this: the Republican leadership today is not against the way we have done the job. The Republican leadership is against the job's being done.
Social Security Works is fighting to protect and improve Medicare. There’s no reason that Medicare can’t offer an out-of-pocket cap or dental, hearing, vision, and long-term care insurance just like certain private plans. Republicans have blocked bills with those improvements because their Wall Street paymasters don’t want their private plans to compete on a level playing field. Republicans and Wall Street know that private plans will lose in a fair fight.
Together, we will defeat the Wall Street greed that is killing seniors. Can you chip in $7 today to save Medicare?
Thank you,
Michael Phelan
Social Security Works
1 https://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/20/us/politics-gingrich-on-medicare.html
2 https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/half-of-all-eligible-medicare-beneficiaries-are-now-enrolled-in-private-medicare-advantage-plans/
3 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/health/medicare-advantage-plans-report.html
4 https://healthpolicy.usc.edu/research/ma-enrolls-lower-spending-people-leading-to-large-overpayments/
5 https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-democratic-state-convention-syracuse-ny
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