The bipartisan murder of Medicare.

My drawings and painting can be seen on Instagram @klonskyart.

I’ve been writing about Thursdays’s government report of how tens of thousands of people enrolled in private Medicare Advantage plans are denied necessary care that should be covered under the program.

But even before Thursday’s report on private insurers over-charging the government and denying medical care to MA members, I have warned of the Biden administration building on a Trump-era pilot program that could fully privatize traditional Medicare by the end of the decade

The Biden administration in February announced it is redesigning a Trump-era experiment that is nothing more than a scheme to fully privatize Medicare.

Instead of ending what's known as the Direct Contracting model, which the Trump administration officially launched in 2020, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) gave the program a new name: ACO REACH, which stands for Accountable Care Organization Realizing Equity, Access, and Community Health.

But ARCO REACH is just rebranding of old shit.

Biden’s plan will switch all of us over to a profit-based model and will end the pay-for-services model that Medicare currently uses for those on Original Medicare.

Your agreement is neither asked for nor will it be required.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced earlier this year that Medicare Advantage (MA) plans will see an 8.5% revenue bump on average in 2023.

It will be the largest payment increases to MA insurers in the program's history.

MA plans insert a private middleman—commercial insurers—between healthcare providers and Medicare. That arrangement leads to higher costs and worse care for patients.

MA plans have been exposed for a practice known as "upcoding," which involves making patients appear sicker than they actually are.

The patient is then assigned a higher risk score and the private insurer charges the feds more.

It is pure scam.

An investigation by the Center for Public Integrity found that "risk scores of Medicare Advantage patients rose sharply in plans in at least 1,000 counties nationwide between 2007 and 2011, boosting taxpayer costs by more than $36 billion over estimated costs for caring for patients in standard Medicare."

But that is what privatization means.