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Open in TheBrain

medicare 2 medicaid

220 bak

SEE BIG BEUT BILL GUTS SEE FIX FOX BIZ

BITE ASS MAGA BASE

see VOUGHT OMB OIRA? 6 26

SEE DR OZ MOFO

see ACA4

see social safety net AND two AND THREE

see advantage pvt BS

see mental health crisis line

SEE WORK REQ bs OMB

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GOP routinely block medicare expansion, even tho feds pay 90%

sen tillis ~ BBB bailled 7 25

BTB 6 26

work medicaid?ps://elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/this-new-omb-rule-is-bigger-than

https://elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of-key-changes-in-ombs-proposed

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/05/29/2026-10817/regulation-for-federal-financial-assistance

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AN 10 26 TC

Dr. Mehmet Oz lashed out at a reporter after she challenged President Donald Trump's effort to shore up rural health care with a new $50 billion fund, despite the much larger Medicaid cuts included in the same law

The heated exchange came during an interview with Molly Martinez of Gray Media's Washington News Bureau. Martinez claimed the White House was providing a solution to a financial problem its own legislation caused.

Martinez pointed to projections showing that Trump's signature domestic policy law would reduce federal Medicaid spending in rural areas by $137 billion over ten years, while the administration has also advanced a $50 billion initiative to improve medical services in rural regions.

Oz, who leads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, erupted at the numbers, raising his voice.

In a video she posted on X, Oz told Martinez, "You're repeating talking points that are not only wrong, but they're deliberately duplicitous.”

Martinez then asked him to explain what he believed was wrong.

Oz dismissed the $137 billion figure as an inaccurate depiction of what goes directly to rural institutions, arguing that Medicaid funding generally passes through the states to large hospital systems in cities and doesn't reach smaller, rural providers.

He argued that the administration's new rural health program delivered an unprecedented increase in resources for those communities.

However, Martinez didn’t back down and pressed the comparison again, accusing the administration of returning only a small fraction of what its law would take away.

"That is incorrect and dishonest and a deliberately duplicitous question," Oz responded.

Independent research backs the funding comparison based on the underlying figures. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that the law which Trump signed on July 4, 2025, will result in a reduction of federal Medicaid spending across the country by $911 billion over a ten-year period, including the $137 billion for rural areas.

The Rural Health Transformation Program, which has a $50 billion budget, will provide states with funding over a five-year period from 2026 to 2030. However, according to KFF, this total represents about 37 percent of the estimated rural Medicaid reductions, even though the programs have different aims and time frames.

The grants also can't replace the lost Medicaid revenue, since federal rules limit direct payments to providers to 15 percent of a state's award and prevent using those funds to supplement existing Medicaid payments.

To support her figures, Martinez referred to the Congressional Budget Office and the Center for American Progress. She also mentioned the impact on rural patients who must travel long distances to reach hospitals.

After Martinez told Oz that she has spoken to people who find healthcare unaffordable and asked what he has to say to them, the former TV show host responded: "We're pouring money into places where the money should be spent."

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AN 8 26

The fallout from President Donald Trump’s unpopular Big Beautiful Bill keeps hitting impoverished red states harder than others a hospitals and voters come to terms with yawning debt and healthcare cuts threatening critical hospitals.

Mississippi Today reports state lawmakers face a “daunting task” trying to fill the holes Trump blasted into the state budget with his looming federal cuts. Unhappy with their options, the Republican-dominated legislature failed to address some of the most pressing issues with Trump’s cuts during the legislative session, so the looming blast holes are still waiting.

Mississippi is one of many impoverished state with a high percentage of uninsured population who do not reimbursement hospitals for visits. But Mississippi Today reports Medicaid is expected to lose $1 billion over the course of the next decade as a result of “Trump’s sweeping tax and spending bill signed into law in July.” To further complicate matters, Republicans let federal enhanced premium tax credits for Affordable Care Act Marketplace insurance expire late last year, making health care much more expensive for “hundreds of thousands of Mississippians.”

The problem is such a big issue that Republican state Rep. Sam Creekmore predicted much of next year’s legislative session will involve patching over Trump’s federal cuts.

“I figure that will be a lot of our time going forward out of session and next year,” Creekmore said.

But Joan Alker, executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families, said people like Creekmore shouldn’t get their hopes up for a solution.

“As a general matter, states are not going to be able to fill the gaping hole that Congress and President Trump have created here,” Alker told MS Today. “[No] state, no matter how wealthy or well-intentioned, is going to be able to sustain that.”

Sen. Hob Bryan, a Democrat, lamented that state lawmakers were powerless to do anything about problems made at the federal level.

“… I’m absolutely terrified about what is going to happen to people in rural areas. Rural areas have been transformed by the big boys before,” Bryan said.

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an 8 26

From dismantling the Affordable Care Act to supporting Republican lawmakers’ attacks on Medicare and Medicaid, President Donald Trump has made it much more difficult for people to receive health care during his second term. Now a new report reveals how millions of Americans will literally die because of these policies — that is, once their votes for Trump are in the bag.

“When the Republican Congress enacted Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill in July 2025, it included massive cuts in the Medicaid program, totaling around $1 trillion over 10 years—but made sure to postpone them until 2027, conveniently after the midterm elections,” wrote The New Republic's Norman J. Ornstein on Sunday. “The cuts focused on adding onerous work and paperwork requirements, all designed to force recipients off the rolls, and will remove somewhere between 10 and 15 million people from the program, leaving them without any health coverage. That is in addition to the millions losing coverage or facing huge premium increases with the erasure of subsidies for the Affordable Care Act.”

Ornstein added, “But the impact will go far beyond those directly losing their health insurance. Medicaid money does not go to Medicaid recipients. It goes to the providers. The loss of a major chunk of the money going out to them will have big reverberations.”

After detailing how the cuts will harm hospitals and nursing homes in essential ways, Ornstein characterized the consequences as devastating to American patients. For example, when it comes to the hospital cuts, ERs will be overtaxed while hundreds of necessary workers will be thrown into unemployment. Patients will find it more difficult to receive care, even as health workers struggle to make ends meet.

“As for the nursing homes, some will close; others will cut staff and staff pay,” Ornstein wrote. “The ratio of residents to staff will decline, meaning residents unable to secure help when they need it for such vital tasks as getting medications when they require them, getting help going to the bathroom, getting help in bed to prevent bedsores or worse, having responsive care during a health trauma or emergency. More unqualified staff could mean more abuse of the residents.”

He concluded, “There will be more effects seen throughout the country, for everyone who is a part of our intertwined health care system, from those working in it to those using it. No wonder Republicans made sure none of the Medicaid cuts would happen before voters experienced the impact.”

Referring to America as a “kakistocracy,” or government run by the least competent and most corrupt, Ornstein opined that “it turns out that kakistocracy is not just a funny word, but a reality with horrific consequences.”

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mma

Millions of people will lose healthcare coverage following GOP rollback of ACA subsidies. Over four months, Fox News has barely acknowledged it. | Media Matters for America

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an 10 25

Not a 'gut-wrenching' Problem: Republican senator shrugs off millions losing subsidies

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:{b3 medicare cuts will hurt/close rural hosp and NURSING HOMES

make healthcare more dificult and expensive FOR EVERYONE

TAX CUT $6K FOR RICHER sR TEMP?!

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see fox bs //

mma

Right-wing media push Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill as estimates find over 11,000 could die annually from loss of Medicaid

When all aspects of the bill are considered, one study estimated it could lead to 51,000 excess deaths per year

Written by John Knefel

Published 06/24/25

Two analyses of the House of Representatives’ version of President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” found that its deep Medicaid cuts — which right-wing media figures have supported for months — would result in more than 11,000 preventable deaths annually. When all aspects of the legislation are included, according to one of the analyses, the bill could cause an estimated 51,000 preventable deaths per year.

Right-wing media figures, however, have repeatedly claimed that people who “deserve” to be on Medicaid won’t be affected by the bill. Instead, they falsely argue that Medicaid will be strengthened for “the people that actually need it,” as Fox News’ Sean Hannity put it recently.

It remains to be seen exactly how much congressional Republicans will end up slashing Medicaid, as the House legislation passed on May 22 and the Senate is currently finalizing its own version.

The House version of the bill finances massive tax benefits for the extremely wealthy with its steep Medicaid cuts, which include the harshest Medicaid work requirements Congress has ever put forward.

The bill would also limit states’ ability to access federal funding by freezing what’s known as provider taxes, and punish states that use their own money to offer health insurance to immigrants.

The Senate’s proposed Medicaid cuts are even deeper than those in the House bill.

Researchers estimate Medicaid cuts in GOP bill could result in over 11,000 deaths annually

The two studies that examined the House’s legislation came to similar conclusions, though one focused primarily on the bill’s Medicaid provisions while the other took a look at the legislation as a whole.

The more recent study, from the Annals of Internal Medicine, was published June 17 and examined the House GOP’s proposed Medicaid cuts.

“Enactment of the House bill advanced in May would increase the number of uninsured persons by 7.6 million and the number of deaths by 16 642 annually, according to a mid-range estimate,” the authors write.

The authors stress that even this estimate could be an undercount, as their figures “exclude harms from lowering provider payments and shrinking benefits, as well as possible repercussions from states increasing taxes or shifting expenditures from other needs to make up for shortfalls in federal Medicaid funding.”

They also acknowledge that they and the Congressional Budget Office — which offers analysis of federal spending — made an “assumption that many of those losing Medicaid coverage would find alternative coverage,” which “may be overly optimistic.”

Conservative pundits have frequently pushed the false narrative that the Republican legislation won’t harm people who “deserve” health insurance

Previously, analysis from KFF found that the proposed bill would decimate hospitals that provide care to large numbers of Medicaid recipients, especially in rural areas, which would likely compound the harms of the legislation.

The other research into the Big Beautiful Bill’s effects, published June 3, was conducted by experts at the Yale School of Public Health, and was commissioned by two Senate committees working on their chambers’ version of the bill.

The Yale experts estimated that 7.7 million people would lose insurance as a result of the House bill, which would “result in an estimated 11,300 additional deaths annually due to lost access to Medicaid or ACA Marketplace coverage.”

The stark number increases dramatically when other aspects of the bill are included. The proposed legislation would end support for Medicare Savings Programs — cost sharing programs that allow Medicaid to pay Medicare premiums — leading to an estimated 1.38 million low-income Medicare beneficiaries losing their coverage. The authors write that the bill “would increase mortality by 18,200 per year due to reduced access to subsidized prescriptions.”

The House version also repeals nursing home staffing standards — which could lead to an estimated 13,000 deaths annually — and fails to extend the Affordable Care Act premium tax credit, which the authors write “is expected to push another 5 million Americans into uninsurance, resulting in 8,811 more deaths each year.”

In all, the authors estimate that the Big Beautiful Bill could result in more than 51,000 preventable deaths every year.

Right-wing media insists those who “deserve” coverage won’t be affected by the bill

These credible estimates are virtually absent from right-wing media coverage of the bill. To the contrary, conservative pundits have supported many of the most draconian aspects of the Big Beautiful Bill, including its burdensome and unnecessary work requirements — one of the key mechanisms in the legislation to kick people off of Medicaid.

Conservative pundits have also frequently pushed the false narrative that the Republican legislation won’t harm people who “deserve” health insurance, whether that’s Medicaid or private plans purchased through the ACA.

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How Fox News is hiding the GOP’s brutal Medicaid cuts

06/26/25

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sn an 6 25

U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley is presenting himself as the rare Republican willing to fight for low-income Americans who will lose their health care or food assistance if his party makes massive cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. He has been rewarded with much credulous reporting suggesting he is sincere about that.

But as Missouri’s senior U.S. senator and former attorney general, it’s fair to expect Hawley to know what is happening on the ground here: an abject failure to administer federal benefits in compliance with current law.

There is absolutely no possibility that Missouri can handle additional red tape like the “work requirements” in both the House and Senate versions of Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill,” yet Hawley has endorsed them.

Missouri just isn’t capable of enhanced eligibility requirements. A lawsuit brought by disabled Missourians who were denied SNAP benefits, formerly known as food stamps, proves this.

One plaintiff with cancer and COPD, lacking internet access, transportation — and, let’s not forget, food —used her prepaid cell phone minutes sitting on hold for days trying to get an application. When she gave up and paid for a ride to a benefits office, she got an application but couldn’t complete the required interview due to lack of staff. So she spent more days on hold before having her application denied for failure to complete the interview that she couldn’t get.

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That lawsuit was filed when Hawley’s fellow senator from Missouri, Eric Schmitt, was our attorney general. Instead of fixing the problem, the state has defended the lawsuit for three years.

When the court found that Missouri was not complying with the law, current Attorney General Andrew Bailey appealed a non-appealable order that merely requires monthly progress reports on call wait times. In January of this year, the lowest daily average call wait time was 58 minutes and the highest average was 2 hours. The maximum wait time was 5 hours, roughly 21,000 calls were dropped and 14,134 callers gave up (or ran out of cell phone minutes, or had to pick up their kids, or had to go to work, etc).

On the Medicaid front, Missouri was investigated and offered support by the Biden Administration to deal with our worst in the nation, legally non-compliant wait times for enrollment.

Individuals submitting their renewal information — online, in person, by fax, or even certified mail — regularly lose their coverage automatically because the state fails to process their documents in time.

A woman who already had coverage through MO HealthNet, Missouri’s Medicaid program, went months without prenatal care because she was unable to reach anyone to tell them she was pregnant.

When the pandemic freeze on Medicaid disenrollments expired, Missouri made a mess of the eligibility review process so families learned at the pediatrician’s office that their children had lost their health insurance despite still being eligible. Children who went without medications for manageable conditions like asthma ended up at emergency rooms.

Now imagine everyone has to navigate a dysfunctional system every six months to keep their health insurance as both versions of the bill would require. Or even once a month – as the bills would allow.

You have to take time off work to prove you are working. Or you have to use up time and cell phone minutes to try to prove you can’t work and qualify for an exemption. In a system as broken as Missouri’s, many people can’t jump through those hoops even when they treat it like a full time job.

If Missouri can’t or won’t run it’s SNAP program properly under current law – where the federal government pays all of the benefits and 50% of the cost of administering those food aid dollars that go straight into our local economies – there is no way food insecurity here won’t get significantly worse and our economy won’t take a serious hit with Republicans’ planned cuts.

Those proposed cuts include states losing at least 5% and up to 25% of their SNAP dollars depending on their “error rate” of under and over payments to households with SNAP. Missouri’s most recent error rate is 10.2%, which means we would lose 25% of our funding for being over 10%, like the majority of states. And the bill would also cut funding for administrative costs which will inevitably make our error rate worse. SNAP is an optional program, and I wouldn’t put it past our legislature to end it all together and let people starve.

As to Medicaid, instead of allocating the funding needed to run MO HealthNet properly, our legislators blame leadership issues or technology problems. Our legislature has done nothing to prepare for what the proposed Trump cuts would do to us, nor what the DOGE impoundments are already doing. They just keep passing tax cut after tax cut.

Given we are not currently capable of running our Medicaid or SNAP programs, there is no possibility that we can manage added expensive red tape.

But that’s the goal. Republicans know, because it has been widely documented, that work requirements don’t work even in more functional states. They don’t increase employment because people with Medicaid who can work are already working.

(I am setting aside the larger undiscussed issue of why working full time in the U.S. is not enough to afford health care, unlike in peer nations.)

The idea that there is $880 billion, or even a fraction of that, in “fraud, waste, and abuse,” in Medicaid is ridiculous. The savings Republicans are counting on would come from deliberately making it too burdensome for the struggling people these programs were intended to help to continue using them.

Look at Arkansas. The state implemented a work requirement and 18,000 people lost their insurance in the few months before a court determined the requirement had been illegally implemented.

Georgia enacted a program in lieu of Medicaid expansion that requires monthly eligibility paperwork. It has enrolled only 3% of Georgians with qualifying incomes, and the money spent on verifying eligibility has dwarfed that spent on providing actual medical care.

Republicans are counting on this happening on a much larger scale to offset their tax cuts. It’s an incredibly wasteful and dangerous strategy.

We burn money on processes to root out non-existent “fraud.” Then, when the people least equipped to navigate those processes can’t do so, they will lose their preventative health care and end up sicker and resorting to more expensive care at hospitals that are required by law to treat them regardless of ability to pay. Then all our premiums go up.

In Missouri, cuts will exacerbate our existing shortage of healthcare providers as more rural hospitals shutter due to lack of funds.

Hawley acknowledged that Missouri’s rural hospitals are in trouble when he opposed a different provision in the House bill, which would curtail a Republican-created and very popular state tax used to get federal Medicaid dollars to hospitals. (He has since caved on the House’s curtailment, and now only opposes the Senate’s significantly more drastic one.)

Rural Missourians will have particular difficulty navigating the work requirement due to lacking internet access, transportation, and job opportunities. And you know what makes it harder to keep a job? Losing your health insurance so you can’t manage your health conditions.

Despite there being no universe in which Missouri becomes capable of administering additional eligibility requirements anytime soon, Hawley doesn’t even object to Republicans moving the implementation deadline up from 2029 to next year. This is not a serious proposal for a functioning eligibility process. It’s a plan to take insurance from eligible people on purpose.

When Hawley was asked last week about people “inadvertently losing coverage,” he said: “We can sort that out.” How? If it’s so easy to sort, why didn’t Hawley or Schmitt sort it out when they were state officials or since?

Hawley is portraying himself as an advocate for the people by using the Trumpian tactic of telling us that up is down and a cut is not a cut. Presuming Hawley knows anything about the reality in Missouri, he knows better.

Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.

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AN 6 25

Dr. Oz — who has $200 million — says Americans must 'earn the right' to be on Medicaid

David Badash

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an 6 25 does he know he is lying/wrong? prolly

“One out of every $5 or $6 in Medicaid [payments] is improper.”

Russell Vought stated on June 1, 2025, in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Responding to charges that President Donald Trump’s tax and spending bill would cut Medicaid coverage for millions of Americans, Trump administration officials misleadingly counter that it targets only waste, fraud, and abuse.

During an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Russell Vought, the administration’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, framed Medicaid as sagging under the weight of improper payments.

An “improper” payment refers to payments made erroneously to beneficiaries and their providers or without sufficient documentation.

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Pressed June 1 by CNN host Dana Bash about concerns that low-income Americans would suffer if the bill becomes law, Vought called such arguments “totally ridiculous.”

“This bill will preserve and protect the programs, the social safety net, but it will make it much more commonsense,” Vought said. “Look, one out of every $5 or $6 in Medicaid [payments] is improper.”

That would mean Medicaid’s improper payment rate is 16% to 20%.

In a 2024 report covering the years 2022, 2023, and 2024, Medicaid’s parent agency — the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services — said the rate was about 5.1%.

One conservative group, the Paragon Health Institute, said the agency has been using an incomplete calculation method and that the percentage could be as high as 25%. Other experts told PolitiFact that the actual numbers could be higher than what the federal government reports, although not as high as Paragon’s estimate.

The White House did not respond to an inquiry for this article.

How High Is the Medicaid Improper Payment Rate?

Medicaid and its closely related Children’s Health Insurance program provides health care and long-term care to roughly 83 million lower-income beneficiaries, accounting for about one-fifth of health care spending overall. It is funded through a mix of federal and state money and is administered by states under federal government rules.

Every year, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services publishes official numbers for the share of improper Medicaid payments, and in other federal health insurance programs the agency oversees.

In a 2024 review of payments made in 2022, 2023, and 2024, the agency found that 5.09% of Medicaid payments totaling $31.10 billion were improper.

The 5.09% rate represented a decrease from the 8.58% rate cited in its 2023 report, which was also based on a three-year time span. The 2024 figure represented the third consecutive annual decline.

Are These Numbers Complete?

In March 2025, Brian Blase, a conservative health policy analyst and president of Paragon Health, a health policy think tank, co-authored a report that said the official CMS improper payment rate figures were unrealistically low for eight of the past 10 years, because in some years the agency failed to undergo widespread auditing of its beneficiaries’ Medicaid eligibility.

From 2017 to 2019, during Trump’s first term, Blase served as Trump’s special assistant for economic policy. Before that, he served as a health policy analyst for the Senate Republican Policy Committee and has worked for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

The report said if the agency’s analysis had looked at eligibility checks every year, more ineligible beneficiaries and payments on their behalf would have been discovered. The report said this might have increased the improper payment rate as high as 25%, based on the rates found in 2020 and 2021, when a high number of eligibility checks were included in the agency’s methodology.

However, it’s hard to confirm whether lack of eligibility auditing caused higher improper payment rates in 2020 and 2021, said Jennifer Wagner, director of Medicaid eligibility and enrollment at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank.

Wagner said Medicaid enrollment procedures have fluctuated, which could help explain the higher rates in some years rather than others. Using two years of data to generalize about trends across a decade, she said, is not necessarily valid.

Robert Westbrooks, the federal Pandemic Response Accountability Committee executive director who worked in government oversight roles during Democratic and Republican administrations, told PolitiFact it’s plausible that the officially reported improper payment rates for Medicaid could be too low.

However, Westbrooks said pinpointing how much higher the rate is in reality is a speculative process. “I don’t believe anyone can credibly quantify the [difference],” he said.

What Is an Improper Payment?

Health care experts emphasized that improper payments are not the same thing as waste, fraud, or abuse.

CMS maintains official definitions for these terms:

By contrast, an improper payment “includes any payment to an ineligible recipient, any payment for an ineligible good or service, any duplicate payment, any payment for a good or service not received, and any payment that does not account for credit for applicable discounts,” KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News, wrote this year.

“Although all fraudulent payments are improper, not all improper payments are fraudulent,” said Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law at George Washington University’s law school. “Most providers identify the improper payments and return them knowing how aggressively enforced” the legal provisions are. “When they don’t, they open the door to significant liability.”

CMS said about 79% of improper payments happened when there was insufficient documentation.

This typically involved cases in which a state or provider missed an administrative step, and it did not necessarily indicate fraud or abuse, the agency said. Instead, it could be an accidental oversight or mistake.

In other words, it was rare for ordinary beneficiaries to be scamming the government. “The vast majority of fraud in Medicaid is committed by providers or other actors, not enrollees,” Wagner said.

Our Ruling

Vought said that “one out of every $5 or $6 in Medicaid [payments] is improper.”

The official improper payment rate calculated by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in 2024 was about 5%, smaller than the 16% to 20% rate Vought described.

A health policy analyst and former Trump adviser said methodological shortcomings in the agency’s analysis could mean the rate is as high as 25%. Although it’s possible the rate is higher than the 5% the government reported, how much higher is speculative.

The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts, namely the federal government’s own data. We rate the statement Mostly False.

Our Sources...

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an 6 25

Dr. Mehmet Oz, President Donald Trump’s Administrator for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is facing sharp criticism after suggesting that the more than ten million people projected to lose their healthcare under the current Republican budget bill do not matter.

The legislation as written requires that many Medicaid users work and provide documentation that they have worked at least 80 hours each month, or be kicked off the critical safety net. Many Republicans have been suggesting Medicaid users are intentionally not working so they can collect federal government benefits like Medicaid. But many Medicaid users do work, and many cannot find jobs.

“Go out there, do the entry-level jobs, get into the workforce. Prove that you matter, get agency into your own life,” Dr. Oz, the former television talk show host and promoter of allegedly questionable health supplements and other products, told Fox Business.

READ MORE: ‘He. Is. Lying.’: GOP Senator Ripped for Spinning Medicaid Cuts as ‘Transitioning’

“It’s a much more enjoyable experience if you’re going through a life thinking that you control your destiny, and you’ll get better insurance at the same time,” he claimed.

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Nearly half of employers—about 46%—do not offer health insurance at all. Most exclude part-time workers from coverage. Gig workers typically receive no health benefits through their jobs. And many seasonal workers struggle to meet the monthly hour thresholds needed to remain eligible for Medicaid.

The Hill also reported that Dr. Oz said to people not willing to go back to work, volunteer, or take care of a loved one, “we are going to ask you to do something else. Go on the exchange, or get a job and get onto regular commercial insurance. But we are not going to continue to pay for Medicaid for those audiences.”

Critics blasted Oz.

“When asked about Medicaid cuts, the literal head of the federal agency overseeing Medicaid had this to say: ‘Prove that you matter.’ Absolutely incredible,” remarked Andrea Ducas, Vice President of health policy at the Center for American Progress.

READ MORE: Trump’s DOT Is Spending Millions to Investigate If DEI Is to Blame for Plane Crashes

“Health care isn’t a prize for being productive. It’s a right. And 16 million people could lose it if this bill passes,” warned the nonprofit Protect Our Care.

“Dr. Oz, who spent his career hawking colloidal silver as a cure-all, tells Medicaid recipients to ‘prove that you matter’ if they want health care,” charged Alexandra De Luca, vice president of communications at the liberal super PAC American Bridge.

Watch the video belowor at this link.

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mma
Right-wing media solidify around “able-bodied” myth as Senate GOP weighs Medicaid cuts

Congressional Republicans are set to kick millions off of Medicaid by implementing work requirements, which conservative pundits falsely claim will strengthen the health insurance program

Written by John Knefel

Research contributions from Sophie Lawton

:{Published 06/04/25

As Republicans in Congress negotiate a budget expected to deliver massive tax cuts to the wealthy while decimating the social safety net, right-wing media figures are perpetuating the myth that large numbers of Medicaid recipients are able-bodied people who refuse to work and therefore should be removed from the program.

The messaging from conservative pundits echoes rhetoric from the Trump administration, which denies that its proposals will kick millions of people off of Medicaid. Instead, the White House is arguing that those who will lose Medicaid coverage “didn’t deserve it in the first place,” according to Politico, which further reports that the administration’s goal is to win passage for the bill “by redefining what qualifies as a cut.”

House Republicans passed their version of the bill on May 22. It has now been taken up by the Senate.

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MAGA media parrot GOP lie about looming Medicaid cuts

Analysts predict millions of Americans will lose Medicaid coverage to fund Republican tax cuts for the rich

Written by Zachary Pleat

Published 06/03/25 mma

Trump administration officials and Republican lawmakers are getting help from their MAGA media allies to deny the effects of their “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which passed the GOP-controlled House last month and is expected to kick millions of Americans off their Medicaid coverage while cutting taxes for the rich. Journalists and experts are calling out these Republicans for their lies that their bill won’t cut Medicaid.

Following this criticism, the administration is reportedly shifting its argument to falsely claim that the only people who will lose Medicaid coverage will be those who don’t deserve it, specifically “people who are here illegally” and “capable and able-bodied men who refuse to work.” This too, is a lie.

The vast majority (92%) of people on Medicaid already work or engage in caregiving or have disabilities or other statuses that would exempt them from a work requirement. The remaining 8% of the population is overwhelmingly made up of women, not the hypothetical “capable and able-bodied men who refuse to work.” And furthermore, federal Medicaid funding already cannot be used to pay for coverage of undocumented immigrants; states that currently provide analogous health care coverage to undocumented immigrants do so with their own tax dollars.

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  1. ### Fox’s Maria Bartiromo whips Republican support for devastating Medicaid cuts

:{05/20/25

  1. ### Newsmax guest: “The problem with the big beautiful bill is that it doesn't kick enough people off Medicaid”

:{06/03/25

  1. ### Sean Hannity calls Medicaid “a cancer that has metastasized”

05/28/25

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an

no lnx

Expert warns 'gaslighting' Republican plan does 'much more harm' than just gutting Medicare

John Stoehr June 04, 2025

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mma

Sean Hannity calls Medicare “a cancer that has metastasized”

05/28/25

MMA

Benny Johnson podcast guest claims it's “a total lie” that the GOP legislation cuts Medicaid from millions of Americans

05/22/25

Contrary to right-wing media claims, the GOP's Medicaid cuts are for far more than “able-bodied men”

05/22/25

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an 5 25

:{:{During the House’s marathon markup of President Donald Trump’s historic budget bill, the Chairwoman of the powerful Rules Committee lashed out at Democrats for plainly describing the legislation’s sweeping consequences. Officially dubbed the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act,” the measure narrowly passed in the early hours of Thursday by a 215–214 vote. }:

It removes $800 billion in funding from Medicaid, would lead to $535 billion in cuts to Medicare, and is projected to cause an estimated 8.6 to 13.7 million Americans to lose their health care. It will also add $3 trillion to the federal deficit—fueled by tax breaks heavily tilted toward the wealthy and the nation’s first-ever $1 trillion defense budget.}:

“I am concerned about what has been said about this bill and what it’s going to do,” Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) told the members of her committee Wednesday night. “The extreme comments that have been made about it, and how I believe that it is scaring people out there in the country unnecessarily.”

“The words I’ve heard, particularly today, are ‘cut,’ ‘rip,’ ‘gut,’ ‘kill,’ ‘cruel,’ ‘stealing food,’ ‘losing coverage,’ ‘jammed through,’ ‘biggest transfer of wealth from vulnerable to wealthy people,’ ‘irresponsible’.”

“That is not the way we ought to be talking about this bill.”

READ MORE: ‘Sovereignly Appointed’: Trump Praised in Pentagon Prayer Event Led by Hegseth and Pastor

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Many appear to disagree.

MSNBC columnist Michael A. Cohen, just after the bill passed Thursday morning, wrote: “What we do know about the legislation the GOP is calling the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’ is genuinely terrifying.”

“What makes this situation even worse is that Republicans, from the president on down, are consistently lying about what the bill would do,” Cohen charged.

“The House Republican budget plan would eviscerate Medicaid and food assistance and shift resources toward the wealthiest Americans,” the Center for American Progress (CAP) warned ten days ago, adding that it “would implement the largest cuts to both Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in history—kicking millions of Americans off their health insurance and taking food away from hungry children.”

“It would raise household electricity costs while trapping most middle-class and poor students in greater student loan debt to afford a higher education,” CAP’s Bobby Kogan, Senior Director for Federal Budget Policy wrote. “And it would make all these changes as a means to partially offset tax breaks that disproportionately go to the richest Americans, giving households in the top 0.1 percent a multihundred-thousand-dollar tax break on average while increasing deficits by trillions of dollars. Taken as a whole, the bill would add trillions of dollars to structural deficits despite these enormous cuts to critical services.”

“If enacted,” Kogan warned, “this would be the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in a single law in U.S. history.”

READ MORE: ‘Get Out of Here’: Trump Erupts, Calls for NBC Probe After Reporter Asks About Qatari Jet

“Taken as a whole, this bill would harm Americans—particularly the most vulnerable people—and leave the country worse off. It would lead to preventable deaths by taking health care away from millions of people. It would worsen food insecurity by taking food away from the hungry, particularly kids.”

“Budgets showcase our morality because they force governments to decide how to prioritize limited resources. The House Republican budget plan would shift funding away from the sick and hungry and, instead, toward the wealthiest Americans.”

U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) responded to Foxx, saying, “In other words, ‘please don’t call this bill what it is or say what it does’.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

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Fox host Brian Kimeade supports cuts to Medicaid: “People get addicted to the free money”

05/21/25

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During his first administration, President Donald Trump’s top health officials gave North Carolina permission to use Medicaid money for social services not traditionally covered by health insurance. It was a first-in-the-nation experiment to funnel health care money into housing, nutrition, and other social services.

Some poor and disabled Medicaid patients became eligible for benefits, including security deposits and first month’s rent for housing, rides to medical appointments, wheelchair ramps, and even prescriptions for fresh fruits and vegetables.

Such experimental initiatives to improve the health of vulnerable Americans while saving taxpayers on costly medical procedures and expensive emergency room care are booming nationally. Without homes or healthy food, people risk getting sicker, becoming homeless, and experiencing even more trouble controlling chronic conditions such as diabetes and heart disease.

Former President Joe Biden encouraged states to go big on new benefits, and the availability of social services exploded in states red and blue. Since North Carolina’s launch, at least 24 other states have followed by expanding social service benefits covered by Medicaid, the health care program for low-income and disabled Americans — a national shift that’s turning a system focused on sick care into one that prioritizes prevention. And though Trump was pivotal to the expansion, he’s now reversing course regardless of whether evidence shows it works.

In Trump’s second term, his administration is throwing participating states from California to Arkansas into disarray, arguing that social services should not be paid for by government health insurance. Officials at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which grants states permission to experiment, have rescinded its previous broad directive, arguing that the Biden administration went too far.

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“This administration believes that the health-related social needs guidance distracted the Medicaid program from its core mission: providing excellent health outcomes for vulnerable Americans,” CMS spokesperson Catherine Howden said in a statement.

“This decision prevents the draining of resources from Medicaid for potentially duplicative services that are already provided by other well-established federal programs, including those that have historically focused on food insecurity and affordable housing,” Howden added, referring to food stamps and low-income housing vouchers provided through other government agencies.

Trump, however, has also proposed axing funding for low-income housing and food programs administered by agencies including the departments of Housing and Urban Development and Agriculture — on top of Republican proposals for broader Medicaid cuts.

The pullback has led to chaos and confusion in states that have expanded their Medicaid programs, with both liberal and conservative leaders worried that the shift will upend multibillion-dollar investments already underway. Social problems such as homelessness and food insecurity can cause — or worsen — physical and behavioral health conditions, leading to sky-high health care spending. Medical care delivered in hospitals and clinics, for instance, accounts for only roughly 15% of a person’s overall health, while a staggering 85% is influenced by social factors such as access to healthy food and shelter for sleep, said Anthony Iton, a policy expert on social determinants of health.

Health care experts warn the disinvestment will come at a price.

“It will just lead to more death, more suffering, and higher health care costs,” said Margot Kushel, a primary care doctor in San Francisco and a leading researcher on homelessness and health care.

The Trump administration announced in a March 4 memo that it was rescinding Biden-era guidance dramatically expanding experimental benefits known as health-related social needs. Federal waivers are required for states to use Medicaid funds for most nontraditional social services outside of hospitals and clinics.

Last month, the administration told states that these services, which can also include high-speed internet and storage units, should not be part of Medicaid.

Future waiver requests allowing Medicaid to provide social services — a liberal philosophy — will be considered on a “case-by-case basis,” the administration said. Rather, it has signaled a conservative shift toward requiring most Medicaid beneficiaries to prove that they’re working or trying to find jobs, which puts an estimated 36 million Americans at risk of losing their health coverage.

“What they’re arguing is Medicaid has been expanded far beyond basic health care and it needs to be cut back to provide only basic coverage to those most desperately in need,” said Mark Peterson, a health policy expert at UCLA. “They’re making the case, which is not widely shared by specialists in the health care field, that it’s not the job of taxpayers and Medicaid to pay for all this stuff outside the traditional heath care system.”

Although states have not received formal guidance to end their social experiments, Peterson and other health policy researchers expect the administration not to renew waivers, which typically run in five-year intervals. Worse, legal experts say programs underway could be halted early.....

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A letter that a group of 20 far-right House Republicans released earlier this week as part of a campaign in support of slashing Medicaid appears to have been authored by the head of a research institute with ties to the Koch network.

Politicoreported Friday that "digital metadata embedded in a PDF copy" of the letter that was circulated inside the House of Representatives "lists the author as Brian Blase, president of Paragon Health Institute."

InfluenceWatch notes that in 2021, Paragon received a nearly $2 million donation from Stand Together, "a right-libertarian funding organization that acts as the umbrella organization for the political network that is largely funded by right-leaning businessman and political donor Charles Koch."

Paragon recently urged federal policymakers to require states to conduct more frequent eligibility checks for Medicaid recipients in a purported effort to root out improper payments. Health policy advocates say such a change would make it more difficult for eligible enrollees to keep their Medicaid coverage.

The letter signed by Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and other House Republicans aligns with Paragon's objectives, claiming that "political abuse" of Medicaid "is helping to bankrupt the federal government" and calling for "structural Medicaid reform" in the party's forthcoming reconciliation package.

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Tony Carrk, executive director of the watchdog group Accountable.US, said in a statement that "you'd be hard pressed to find a more shameless example of congressional Republicans taking their cues from special interests at the cost of the American people than Chip Roy copying and pasting a letter directly from... special interests."

"This remarkably blatant kowtowing to conservative billionaires is a sad reflection of the congressional Republicans' willingness to make devastating cuts to Americans' healthcare to pay for lower taxes for the richest," said Carrk.

The letter was released as congressional Republicans grappled internally with how and how much to cut Medicaid as they seek to offset the massive projected costs of another round of tax breaks for the rich.

Earlier this week, as Common Dreamsreported, Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said he would not accept more than $500 billion in cuts to Medicaid over the next decade. Cuts of that magnitude would still be the largest in the program's history and would strip health coverage from tens of millions of people.

ref

A letter signed by 20 hard-line House Republicans calling for deep cuts to Medicaid in the GOP’s domestic policy megabill appears to be written at least in part by a conservative think tank with ties to top Republican leaders.

Rep. Chip Roy of Texas led the letter and promoted it publicly but digital metadata embedded in a PDF copy circulated inside the House and obtained by POLITICO lists the author as Brian Blase, president of Paragon Health Institute.

Blase served on the White House National Economic Council during President Donald Trump’s first term. He and other conservative health wonks launched Paragon in 2021, and it has rapidly gained influence in GOP policy circles. Former Paragon staffers are now top health aides to Speaker Mike Johnson and President Donald Trump.

According to tax records gathered by InfluenceWatch, Paragon has received seven-figure donations from groups linked to high-profile conservative activists Charles Koch and Leonard Leo.

The push from Roy and his fellow hard-liners to enact massive “structural” reforms across Medicaid comes as centrists and even some more conservative-leaning members have raised concerns about cutting too deeply into the program. Trump is also wary of slashing the program but has signaled he supports some efforts to curb spending.

The letter urges House Republicans to pursue “meaningful” reforms to the safety-net health program: “If the House budget reconciliation package does not include structural Medicaid reform that achieves desired Republican outcomes, we will be setting up massive tax increases and benefit cuts in the future,” Roy & Co. wrote. “For once, Congress should stop procrastinating, using excuses, and finally fulfill the Republican agenda.”

Asked if Blase was in fact the document’s author, Paragon spokesperson Anthony Wojtkowiak said in a statement that the group “sent a list of Medicaid reform principles to policymakers.”

“It appears that the excellent letter by Chip Roy and colleagues incorporated some of our ideas,” Wojtkowiak said, noting the group frequently works with lawmakers on policy issues.

A Roy spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

xitter https://x.com/chiproytx/status/1918039017955926054

eli crane and clyde Stutzman mary miller mark harris scot perry keith self, andy fucing ogles, eric burlison sheri biggs barry moore Byron donalds, clay higgins, gosar, any biggs, andy harris MD, josh brecheen, Michael cloud, ralph norman

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kff

Overcome by worries, Lynette Isbell dialed a mental health hotline in April 2022. She wanted to talk to someone about her midlife troubles: divorce, an empty nest, and the demands of caring for aging parents with dementia.

“I did not want to keep burdening my family and friends with my problems,” Isbell said.

But she didn’t find the sympathetic ear she was hoping for on the other end. Frustrated, she hung up. Little did she know ending that call would set off events she would regret.

Police arrived at her home in Terre Haute, Indiana, handcuffed her, and had her committed to a hospital, records show, resulting in more than $12,000 in hospital charges.

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“The whole thing was an absolute, utter, traumatic nightmare,” she said.

Isbell’s call for help represented the need for a new approach to crisis calls just as the nation was readying to flip the switch to a revamped response system for mental health. Using just three digits — 988 — people could call or text for help from anywhere at any time starting in July 2022. Federal officials viewed the launch of 988 “as the linchpin” to reenvision the mental health crisis system. The idea was to reduce the reliance on police and the burden on emergency rooms, while eliminating the stigma of seeking help.

But recent federal funding and staffing cuts undermine the future of the 988 program and threaten to erase progress made in Indiana and elsewhere, mental health advocates said.

The Trump administration cut staffing at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the federal office that oversees 988, in recent weeks. It also ended $1 billion of its grants that a number of states relied on this year to help fund their 988 systems, said Stephanie Pasternak, state affairs director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. While a judge temporarily paused grant cutsfor 23 states that contested them, the trims to other states — including Indiana — have moved forward.

Between the SAMHSA cuts andpotential reductions to Medicaid, another crucial funding stream for these services, Pasternak and others are concerned about what this means for 988’s future.

Any disruption to federal funding streams is “gravely impactful,” said Zoe Frantz, CEO of the Indiana Council of Community Mental Health Centers. “We have put a lot of time, talent, and treasure — from the state to providers — in trying to build the system,” Frantz said. “We can’t go back.”

After Isbell hung up her call, a member of the Suicide Prevention Hotline, the crisis line formerly available, phoned the Vigo County Sheriff’s Office and told a dispatcher Isbell was “thinking of committing suicide,” according to the sheriff’s report obtained by KFF Health News.

Years later, Isbell maintains she never said this. “I’ve never been actively suicidal.”

But two officers drove to Isbell’s home.

When they arrived, Isbell was sitting on her back porch on a sunny day with trees just starting to bud. The officer’s report alleged she admitted to thinking about driving her car into a tree, wanting doctor-assisted suicide, and fantasizing about a semitruck hitting her.

She contends active suicidal ideation with a plan is different than the overwhelmed feelings she had that day.

“It was like a childhood game of telephone, only not at all funny,” she said. What she said became distorted and left her no recourse.

The officers walked her to a squad car, where they handcuffed her before transporting her to Terre Haute Regional Hospital, according to dashcam video obtained from a public records request. Neighbors watched as she was taken away.

“I don’t know why I needed to be handcuffed,” she said. “It was demoralizing.”

The Vigo County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to requests for comment about Isbell’s case.

Isbell said being hospitalized against her wishes humiliated her and forced her to battle confusing medical bills for months. An itemized bill shows the hospital charged $12,772 for her overnight stay. After insurance, Isbell was on the hook for roughly $2,800. By comparison, a one-night stay in the presidential suite at the new Terre Haute Casino Resort is $2,471. Terre Haute Regional Hospital spokesperson Ann Marie Foote said Isbell’s bill was “discounted down” to $1,400.

“Our highest priority is always the safety and well-being of patients,” Foote said.

According to Isbell’s medical records, doctors there said “she was very stressed” and “just wanted to speak to someone” and reiterated “she was not suicidal.” They said her anxiety “is increased and made worse by being in here.”

She had “anxiety” and a “depressed mood,” and, according to medical records signed by a psychiatrist there, “she does not meet current criteria for involuntary hospitalization.” She was discharged the next day.

Upset by how she was treated, she contacted 988, the sheriff’s office, and the hospital.

In response to KFF Health News’ questions about Isbell’s experience, Michele Holtkamp, a spokesperson at the time for Indiana’s Family and Social Services Administration, said that before the launch of 988, “the state did not have oversight of individual crisis lines and how they responded.”

After 988 began, Isbell received a follow-up email from an executive with Mental Health America, introducing her to the director of Indiana’s 988 hotline, Kara Biro.

“I shared your story with her and we agree that we would love to get you to help with a training video,” wrote Brandi Christiansen, CEO of Mental Health America-Wabash Valley Region. She explained it would provide workers an opportunity to understand the real-life implications an “outcall can have on a human being.” The video has yet to happen, Isbell said.

The sheriff’s department also asked for her input to improve the process, she said.

Isbell saw those as signs of a turnaround. For mental health leaders in Indiana, 988 represented a “springboard to transform and build” a new response system, according to a 2022 Indiana Behavioral Health Commission report. Too often, the report said, Indiana’s “ineffective and inefficient” system had relied heavily on police and emergency rooms.

Before 988, the state hotline also relied almost entirely on volunteers, complicating efforts to standardize responses, said Jay Chaudhary, a former director of Indiana’s Division of Mental Health and Addiction, who led the state’s transition to 988.

“When somebody makes the really brave step to seek help with mental health care, that system better be ready to catch them,” he said.

Today, Indiana ranks among the 10 states with the highest 988 answer rates, a sign it can handle the demand, said Laurel Stine, chief advocacy and policy officer with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

In Indiana, behavioral health professionals now lead the response via mobile crisis teams, not law enforcement, such as the officers who handcuffed Isbell.

As of July, mobile crisis teams were available to 4.8 million people living in 65 of Indiana’s 92 counties, reaching roughly 71% of residents, according to a 2024 report from the behavioral health commission. In the first half of last year, mobile crisis teams were dispatched 3,080 times for help. Law enforcement officers were involved in about 1% of those cases and roughly 10% resulted in a trip to the emergency room, according to the report.

Similar efforts have occurred nationwide since the 2022 launch. The 988 hotline received 4.8 million calls, texts, and chats during its first year, which is roughly nine times a minute, according to Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration data.

But the federal government has terminated numerous grants earmarked for Indiana and other states to tackle mental health and substance use issues. Still, SAMHSA spokesperson Danielle Bennett said the 988 hotline is a “critical function” and that the federal government “will never compromise” protecting people experiencing a crisis. The hotline, Bennett said, “continues daily, life-saving work.”

The Indiana agency tasked with overseeing 988 had more than $98 million in SAMHSA grants but received 73% of that as of March 24, when the grants were terminated, according to a government list of cuts. That leaves Indiana $26 million short.

Some federal grants were passed through to local organizations, including one group that received grant money for “mobile crisis units,” according to an online grant summary. In a statement, Indiana Family and Social Services Administration spokesperson James Vaughn confirmed it received notice of the terminated SAMHSA grants but declined to provide details other than to say it is “working to minimize the impact to Hoosiers.”

Isbell hopes the 988 option doesn’t disappear for those who need a hand, not handcuffs.

She dealt with the fallout of that fateful call for a long time. After more than a year, she said, she paid the $1,400 bill to put the ordeal behind her.

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'Hospitals are going to close': Johnson insisted he won’t 'touch Medicaid — but now pushes deep cuts

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Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is blaming what he calls “young men” playing video games instead of working, as he defends Republicans’ plan to gut Medicaid—slashing what Democrats say is $880 billion from the vital health program that provides medical care to one in five Americans.

“No one has talked about cutting one benefit in Medicaid to anyone who’s duly owed — what we’ve talked about is returning work requirements, so, for example, you don’t have able-bodied young men on a program that’s designed for single mothers and the elderly and disabled,” said the Speaker. Johnson’s own Louisiana district has a disproportionately high rate of Americans on the life-saving program: CBS News this week reported Medicaid is a “lifeline” for people in his district.

Johnson blamed what he suggested is a large number of male gamers on Medicaid for “draining resources.”

“So if you clean that up and shore it up, you save a lot of money, and you return the dignity of work to young men who need to be out working instead of playing video games all day,” he again declared.

READ MORE: ‘Giant Grift’: Calls for Trump Insider Trading Probe Surge Over ‘Corruption’ Questions

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“We have a lot of fraud, waste, and abuse in Medicaid. Just one tiny example. The estimate is $51 billion a year, in Medicaid is lost to fraud. That’s unconscionable,” the Louisiana GOP lawmaker claimed.

But rather than target professionals who may be bilking the system, or other factors including paperwork errors, Johnson has chosen to repeatedly target what he claims are “29-year-old males sitting on their couches playing video games.”

The nonpartisan health policy organization KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation) reported in February that “data show most Medicaid adults are working or face barriers to work. Many Medicaid adults who are working low-wage jobs are employed by small firms and in industries that have low employer-sponsored insurance offer rates.”

KFF also reports that the vast majority of adult Medicaid recipients under the age of retirement (65) are already working, with no work requirement.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that adding a work requirement would only serve as a barrier to Medicaid participation, and therefore spending, but would not increase the employment levels for otherwise eligible recipients.

“In Arkansas,” KFF reports, “implementing Medicaid work requirements resulted in more than 18,000 people losing coverage.”

Adding work requirements also increases monitoring and implementation costs at the state level.

Critics blasted Johnson.

READ MORE: ‘Pump and Dump’: Market Manipulation Questions Swirl Over Trump Tariff Pause

“Of course, nothing says ‘dignity’ like ripping healthcare away from poor people based on outdated, classist stereotypes,” wrote Wall Street investment banker Evaristus Odinikaeze. “Young men on Medicaid aren’t ‘playing video games all day,’ they’re often underpaid, overworked, or struggling in a rigged economy. This is just MAGA cruelty dressed up as moral judgment.”

Annie Shoup of the nonprofit Protect Our Care wrote: “We know that people on Medicaid who are able to work already do. This will only hurt people and prevent them from getting the health care they deserve, including caregivers who are staying at home caring for family members.”

The organization Social Security Works added, “Medicaid pays for two-thirds of nursing home care in America. That’s what Mike Johnson wants to rip away from seniors and people with disabilities.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

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  1. ### Fox News keeps misleadingly telling its viewers Trump isn't a threat to Medicaid. A new poll helps to explain why.

04/10/25

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“You need to cut Medicaid”: Right-wing pundits call to gut health coverage for the poor

Written by Emma Mae Weber & Reed McMaster

Research contributions from John Knefel & Zachary Pleat

Published 03/11/25

Right-wing pundits are calling for cuts to Medicaid as the administration searches for ways to offset Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy. Conservative media have set their sights on health care, advocating cuts to Medicaid and work requirements for its beneficiaries, which could knock millions off of their health insurance.

* ## Republicans are currently focusing in on cuts to Medicaid, which could put millions at risk of losing healthcare coverage

* Enacting work requirements for Medicaid could put 36 million people at risk of losing their coverage. As it currently stands, nearly two-thirds of Medicaid recipients are already working full or part-time, while most of the rest are either caring for family, have an illness or disability that prevents them from working, or are in school. The remaining 8% are not working because they are retired, unable to find work, or for another reason. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, [2/5/25; KKF, 2/18/25]

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As Republicans debate a way to cut spending in order to implement President Donald Trump’s tax cuts, they are considering adding work requirements to Medicaid. In order to support the idea, one GOP lawmaker cited two examples: However, those were instances in which Medicaid work requirements actually went wrong.

“There are already tens of millions of Americans who are subject to work requirements. This is not a new concept,” Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) told NOTUS in a piece published Monday. “[Work requirements] are fantastically effective in helping people… The evidence suggests that overwhelmingly, the impact, on average, is positive.”

He listed Maine and Arkansas as examples of where work requirements went well. But in Maine, NOTUS’ Emily Kennard pointed out the potential work requirements were actually rejected. Republican Governor Paul LePage had requested them, and then-President Trump approved them. Later, Democratic Governor Janet Mills, put a stop to the plan. And in Arkansas, a judge ended up blocking the program.

READ MORE:'Hail Mary mode': Industries brace for 'consequences' of Trump tariffs

“Maine’s low unemployment rate, its widely dispersed population, and our lowest per capita income in New England make mandates – without appropriate supports like vocational training and specific exemptions for groups like people undergoing treatment – problematic,” Mills wrote a 2019 letter to U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. “We believe that the likely result of this [requirement] would leave more Maine people uninsured without improving their participation in the workforce.”

In Arkansas, data “tells a much different story than the case Johnson made,” Kennard writes. The only state to implement such requirements, Medicaid recipients age 30 to 49 were notified in 2018 that they were required to work 80 hours per month. Almost 17,000 people lost their coverage as a result. However, a study published by the New England Journal of Medicine found that 97 percent of respondents were eligible under these new requirements.

“Studies found that beneficiaries were confused by the policy, and some lacked internet access to report their work hours,” Kennard adds.

By 2019, a federal judge had stopped the Arkansas program. An appeals court struck down the requirements in 2020. “Failure to consider whether the project will result in coverage loss is arbitrary and capricious,” the 2020 ruling said.

READ MORE:'These are not savings': The 5 largest DOGE cuts actually saved 99% less than Musk claimed

Kennard writes: “While it did not increase beneficiaries’ workforce participation, it did increase medical debt, and delay care for more than half of those disenrolled:64% of people affected delayed taking medication because they couldn’t afford it. The CBO [Congressional Budget Office] concludedin 2023 that “the employment status of and hours worked by Medicaid recipients would be unchanged” by work requirements, but it would lead to more uninsured Americans. The CBO came to that conclusion in part thanks to data from Arkansas.”

But when presented with that information, Johnson said the CBO should not “draw conclusions on the basis of one state’s experience.”

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Steve Bannon: “We’re going to block grant” Medicaid or have “stringent work requirements”

02/26/25 see also ben shapiro

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DAYS BEFORE ENDORSE HOUSE BILL TRUMP SAID HE CHERISH MEDICARE?

Febuary 26, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Story with Martha MacCallum

MARTHA MACCALLUM (HOST): Ari, final thought from you, because obviously you cannot make the kinds of cuts that Elon Musk talked about, which are tremendous. He said you have to cut $4 billion every day in order to meet their goal. You can't do it without getting into Medicare, Medicaid, the programs, and at least looking for fraud.

ARI FLEISCHER (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): Yeah, you know, during the campaign the president said he wouldn't touch Social Security and Medicare — a program for the elderly. Now, he has added, it seems, Medicaid to it, which to me puts the president on thin ice. I don't know how they're going to do what they want to do on Capitol Hill if they can't make reforms to Medicaid. If they're required to lock in all of the surge of people who got put onto Medicaid by the Biden administration post-COVID. These people need to come off. They shouldn't be on Medicaid for life. So, Medicaid needs to be touched. It needs to be touched the right way. But they can't do their job without that.

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Democrats are voicing strong opposition to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s budget framework, which narrowly passed Tuesday night by a razor-thin margin of 217-215.

The framework is widely expected to cut $880 billion from Medicaid, a program that helps one in four Americans, and another $230 billion from SNAP, which helps feed about one in eight Americans — while raising the debt ceiling by $4 trillion to provide a massive $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, largely for the wealthiest of Americans. People making less than $200,000 a year could effectively see their taxes rise, because Johnson’s legislation does not renew tax cuts from 2017. Johnson’s budget, supported by President Donald Trump, requires a minimum of $2 trillion in cuts to the federal budget.

Every Republican except one voted for Johnson’s budget legislation. U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) was the only holdout, refusing to give in to pressure from GOP leadership.

Every Democrat present voted against the bill. Only one was not present due to his battle against cancer.

READ MORE: House GOP: Federal Employees Are ‘Bloated Bureaucrats’ Who ‘Do Not Deserve Their Jobs’

But every other Democrat showed up and stood firm.

“After 3 surgeries, a blood clot, an infection, & being hospitalized for over a week – the moment I was discharged from the hospital, I immediately rushed to the airport so I could fly to D.C. and vote NO on Republicans’ disastrous budget plan. I’m proud to stand with @HouseDemocrats to fight Republican’s extreme agenda,” wrote U.S. Rep. Kevin Mullin, (D-CA).

Republicans refused to allow U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen (D-CO), out on maternity leave, to vote by proxy, so she traveled across the country with her four-week old newborn, Sam, to vote against the GOP budget.

I have a message for Donald Trump: nobody fights harder than a mom.

Republican leadership may have denied my ability to vote by proxy but that didn’t stop us from voting against this disastrous budget that strips away health care and food for seniors, veterans, kids and… pic.twitter.com/rfoKNoyeVJ

— U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen (@RepPettersen) February 26, 2025

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), largely seen as the loudest and most consistent voice on the left opposing President Donald Trump’s agenda, tore into Republicans.

“Good morning. The House voted yesterday to kick millions of off their health care, close rural hospitals, and shut down addiction clinics. All in order to afford a giant tax cut for Elon Musk, Donald Trump and their billionaire and corporate friends,” he charged Wednesday.

On Tuesday, Senator Murphy denounced the GOP’s “greed” at an outdoor press conference.

Calling the Republicans’ budget framework “the most massive transfer of wealth and resources from poor people in the middle class to the billionaires and corporations in the history of this country,” Murphy (video below) said, “You’re talking about 880 billion dollars of cuts to Medicaid.”

“Now I get it, like, $880 billion. Like, what does that mean? Right? That’s a huge number, nobody understands. Let me tell you what that means. That that means that sick kids die in this country. That means that hospitals in depressed communities and rural communities close their doors. Right? That means that drug and addiction treatment centers disappear. All across this country.”

:{READ MORE: Refusing to Publicly Reveal DOGE Head, White House Says It’s Been ‘Incredibly Transparent’

“That means that millions of working families who have insurance today, because by the way, 24% of Americans get their health care from Medicaid, they all of a sudden don’t have their health care tomorrow,” he continued, adding, “the scope of this greed is something that we have never ever seen before in this country, and we should not accept it as normal in the United States of America.”

24% of Americans get their health insurance from Medicaid.

Seniors. Working families. Millions of kids.

Republicans voted tonight to burn Medicaid to the ground.

And for what? To fund a giant tax cut for their billionaire friends.

A moral abomination. pic.twitter.com/Xez9GmzJlC

— Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) February 26, 2025

U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) explained how Johnson’s budget legislation came together, and all the things Republicans voted against.

He said Democrats asked Republicans to “vote against tax breaks for people earning over $100 million per year.”

“Every Republican vote no,” he said, regarding that proposal, as well as on protections for large numbers of Americans who need support.

Republicans voted against assuring “the American people that they’re not gonna steal school meals from kids in order to give tax breaks for millionaires,” and on protecting Medicaid, which McGovern noted, “covers 41% of all births in the United States.”

“Nearly half of children with special healthcare needs and five in eight nursing home residents,” he said, are also covered by Medicaid.

“Democrats offered an amendment preventing tax giveaways for people earning over $1 million a year. Every Republican voted no,” the Massachusetts Democrat said. “We even offered an amendment preventing tax cuts for people with a net worth of over, get this, $1 billion. Every Republican voted no.”

McGovern: Democrats offered an amendment to protect Medicaid. Every Republican voted no.

Democrats offered an amendment to extend tax cuts for people making under $400,000 while ensuring that corporations and billionaires pay their fair share. Every Republican voted no.… pic.twitter.com/IiuC8skXc2

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 25, 2025

Watch the videos above or at this link.

doge fail fired nuke security, does not have info to recall

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an 2 25

Trump’s Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, pushed a claim Monday on Fox News that there may be many dead people receiving Social Security payments. Experts have pushed back against that idea, which has come from Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, indicating that the numbers are off or misinterpreted.

“President Trump has directed Elon Musk and the DOGE team to identify fraud at the Social Security Administration. They haven’t dug into the books yet, but they suspect that there are tens of millions of deceased people who are receiving fraudulent Social Security payments,” she said.

“And so their goal in going into the Social Security Administration is to identify three things. Number one, to identify duplicate payments and to end them. Number two, to identify payments that are going to deceased people who are no longer living and should no longer be receiving that money, and number three, to protect the integrity of this system for hard working Americans who have been paying into it their entire lives.

READ MORE:Author details link between 'Christian nationalism' and MAGA’s 'smashing of the administrative state'

“There are maybe hundreds of deceased people receiving fraudulent benefits, not tens of millions. There are about 70 million people TOTAL receiving Social Security — does anyone really think one third+ of them are dead???” Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, posted on X.

Over the weekend, Musk posted a table supposedly showing that the Social Security database has millions of people in it over the age of 140.

“What's especially frustrating about Musk making it seem as if millions of Social Security checks might be going out to people aged 100+ is that we know how many Social Security checks went out in December to people aged 99+: 89,106,” journalist James Surowiecki posted on X. He added: “89,106 is, as it happens, fewer than the number of centenarians in the U.S., as estimated by the Census. So we are, again, not sending out billions in SS checks to people aged 130.”

Ninety-eight percent of social security number holders who are age 100 or older do not receive benefits, Justin Wolfers, professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, explained on X. “Why are there dead people on (this one table of) the social security database? They died before the use of electronic death records,” he added.

READ MORE:'Time to think of Plan B': Musk ripped after forcing out Social Security chief

“Should government databases be cleaner? It's a cost-benefit question. Cost: $5-10m to clean out the old records Benefit: Only "limited benefit" because "almost none" of these records are receiving payments. This hardly feels like big potatoes, either way,” he explained.

At Wired, David Gilbert wrote: “Computer programmers quickly claimed that the 150 figure,” or the idea that 150-year-olds were collecting Social Security, “was not evidence of fraud, but rather the result of a weird quirk of the Social Security Administration’s benefits system, which was largely written inCOBOL, a 60-year-old programming language that undergirds SSA’s databases as well as systems from many other US government agencies.” He added: “COBOL is rarely used today, and as such, Musk’s cadre of young engineers may well be unfamiliar with it.”

“Musk could also have simply looked up the SSA’s own website, which explains that since September 2015 the agency has automatically stopped benefit paymentswhen anyone reaches the age of 115,” Gilbert wrote.

“When everything they say is designed to mislead, you're left to wonder why,” Wolfers wrote.READ MORE:Lawmaker vows 'strong resistance' if Musk agency recommends Social Security or Medicare cuts

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mma

February 6, 2025, edition of Fox News' America Reports

JOHN ROBERTS (ANCHOR): So Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana who writes about this in the National Review. He says in part, numerous studies show human beings are happier and healthier when employed. Long-term joblessness associated with higher rates of cardiovascular disease, depression, and anxiety. One study even recommended employment as a quote critical mental health intervention.

He says there are 15 million able-bodied adults without children on Medicaid who could probably reenter the workforce. This is kind of like the idea that we saw back in the Clinton administration of welfare to work.

DR. MARC SIEGEL (FOX CONTRIBUTOR): Or bridge to jobs. And I completely agree with everything you just said. It is 15 million that have been identified, John.

In the Trump 1 administration 13 states received approval for just this kind of program and another 9 were applying for it when the Biden administration came in and nixed it. So, this is something on the table for a while.

I agree with the issue it improves health. I also think, by the way, that's its tied in with something else you are going to ask me about, which is people using Medicaid in the wrong way. They might have a way to make money, but they don’t tie it in with their health insurance so essentially Medicaid is part of a nanny state.

You know, the vast majority of people in this country get their insurance by working for it and they are proud of it and might even take a job a little less and they want in order to get the health insurance to provide for their family. With Medicaid it's uncoupled and the federal government pays 70% of Medicaid across the board, so even though it's a state-administered program to a large extent it is a federally-funded program and fraud and abuse and misuse of Medicaid is a federal crime.

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he is in medicare server says that is where the big fraud is but

an 2 25

Medicare Advantage fraud is staring Musk in the face — but critics predict he'll ignore it

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AN 1 25

Under President Joe Biden, enrollment in Medicaid hit a record high and the uninsured rate reached a record low.

Donald Trump’s return to the White House — along with a GOP-controlled Senate and House of Representatives — is expected to change that.

Republicans in Washington say they plan to use funding cuts and regulatory changes to dramatically shrink Medicaid, the nearly $900-billion-a-year government health insurance program that, along with the related Children’s Health Insurance Program, serves about 79 million mostly low-income or disabled Americans.

The proposals include rolling back the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid, which over the last 11 years added about 20 million low-income adults to its rolls. Trump has said he wants to drastically cut government spending, which may be necessary for Republicans to extend 2017 tax cuts that expire at the end of this year.

Trump made little mention of Medicaid during the 2024 campaign. The first Trump administration approved work requirements in several states, though only Arkansas implemented theirs before a federal judge said it violated the law. The first Trump administration also sought to block grant funding to states.

House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) told KFF Health News that Medicaid and other federal entitlement programs need major changes to help cut the federal debt. “Without them, we will watch this country sadly enter into fiscal collapse.”

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a member of the Budget Committee, said Congress needs to explore cutting federal spending on Medicaid.

“You need wholesale reform on the health care front, which can include undoing a lot of the damage being done by the ACA and Obamacare,” Roy said. “Frankly, we could end up providing better service if we do it the right way.”

Advocates for poor people fear GOP funding cuts will leave more Americans without insurance, making it harder for them to get care.

“Medicaid is an obvious target for huge cuts,” said Joan Alker, executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families. “An existential fight about Medicaid’s future likely lies ahead.”

Medicaid, which turns 60 in July, is nearing the end of a disruptive period, after covid pandemic-era coverage protections expired in 2023 and all enrollees had to prove they still qualified. More than 25 million people lost coverage over the 18 months after the “unwinding” began, though it has not notably increased the number of people without insurance, according to the latest census data.

The unwinding’s disruptions could pale in comparison to what happens in the next four years, said Matt Salo, former executive director and founder of the National Association of Medicaid Directors. “What we are going to see is an even bigger seismic shift in who Medicaid covers and how it operates,” he said.

But Salo said any efforts to shrink the program will face pushback.

“A lot of powerful entities — state governments, managed-care organizations, long-term care providers, and everyone under the sun who wants to do well by doing good — wants to see Medicaid work efficiently and be adequately funded,” he said. “And they will be highly motivated to push back on something they see as draconian cuts, because it could affect their business model.”

The GOP is looking at several tactics to reduce the size of Medicaid:

If the GOP’s plans to shrink Medicaid are realized, Democrats and health experts say, low-income people forced to buy private insurance would face challenges paying monthly premiums and the large copayments and deductibles common to commercial plans that typically don’t exist in Medicaid.

The Paragon Health Institute, a leading conservative think tank run by former Trump adviser Brian Blase, has issued reports saying the billions in extra money states took to expand Medicaid under the ACA has been a boon to private insurers that manage the program and relatively wealthier people it says shouldn’t be enrolled.

Josh Archambault, a senior fellow with the conservative Cicero Institute, said he hopes the Trump administration holds states accountable for overpaying providers and enrolling people in Medicaid who are not eligible. Conservatives have cited CMS reports saying states improperly pay Medicaid providers billions of dollars a year, though the federal government notes that is mostly due to lack of documentation.

He said the GOP will look to scale back Medicaid to its “traditional” populations of children, pregnant women, and people with disabilities. “We need to rebalance the program that most people think is underperforming,” he said. Most Americans, including large majorities of both Republicans and Democrats, view the program favorably, according to polls.

*KFF Health

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an 12 24

i’ve shared with you the plans of Trump’s unelected multi-billionaires, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to undermine Social Security — the most popular and successful program in the federal government, into which you’ve paid your entire working life.

Today I want to share their plan to gut Medicaid.

Medicaid is less politically popular than Social Security or Medicare, because it mainly supports poor children and families who have little or no political voice.

But Medicaid covers far more Americans.

Medicaid insures nearly half of all children in the United States. It covers 1 in 5 women of childbearing age. It also pays for a large portion of the nation’s nursing home care and mental health treatment. States and the federal government share its costs, which totaled $880 billion last year.

How are the DOGE billionaires planning to gut it?

First, by turning Medicaid into “block grants,” in which states get lump sums regardless of how many people sign up for the program. Republican senator and founding DOGE caucus member John Cornyn has already publicly stated that he favors this approach.

As more poor children and needy families sign up, block grants will force states to increase their own spending on Medicaid or restrict who gets it. Given the strain on state budgets and the negligible political voice of Medicaid recipients, it will almost surely be the latter.

A second method for gutting Medicaid favored by Musk, Ramaswamy, Cornyn, and other DOGE caucus members is to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients. They claim this would save the federal government at least $100 billion over the next decade.

But the reason for the saving is that work requirements would cause an estimated 600,000 people — most of them unable to work — to lose coverage (according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office).

The third idea DOGE is considering is to cut back on the expansion of Medicaid that came with the Affordable Care Act. That expansion enabled adults in families earning up to $43,000 a year to get health care coverage. (Under it, the federal government pays 90 percent of the costs.)

Step back for a moment and consider what’s being proposed.

If the Affordable Care Act’s expanded Medicaid is cut back, hundreds of thousands of Americans in families earning up to $43,000 a year will lose their health care.

If Medicaid is turned into block grants or if work is required of people unable to work, many hundreds of thousands more will lose their only access to health care, including large numbers of children.

The presumed goal of the DOGE exercise is to reduce the federal budget deficit.

Yet Trump and his billionaires are planning to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which disproportionately have benefited large corporations and wealthy people like themselves, along with additional tax cuts and loopholes for the wealthy.

The estimated cost of extending the Trump tax cuts is at least $5 trillion — more than twice the amount Musk has stated DOGE will cut in “wasteful” government spending.

The richest man in the world and his billionaire colleagues are seeking to reduce money spent for the health care of the poorest and most vulnerable Americans, at the same time they’re seeking to reduce taxes on themselves and others who are the richest and most privileged.

Anything wrong with this picture?

Many of the Americans who will be shafted by all this voted for Trump in 2024.

They may never discover that Trump is behind this because Trump won’t have his fingerprints on the Medicaid cuts. He’ll hide behind Musk and Ramaswamy’s DOGE and the newly formed DOGE caucus in Congress.

Not even their fingerprints will be obvious because block grants to the states, work requirements, and elimination of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion will all do the dirty deed quietly.

Nor will working Americans discover that big corporations and the wealthy are reaping most of the savings from the gutting of Medicaid in the form of lower taxes. Most working Americans haven’t yet discovered how skewed the 2017 Trump tax cut has been to the wealthy and big corporations, so why should they discover it in future years?

One more thing.

Employer-sponsored health insurance — available to most salaried workers in large corporations but rarely to hourly workers or contract workers — remains untaxed.

This is one of the largest tax expenditures in the federal government.

As I said, Medicaid costs about $880 billion a year. The exclusion from taxes of employer-provided health insurance costs the federal government a very large fraction of that — the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated $299 billion in 2022; the Congressional Budget Office projects $641 billion by 2032.

It’s another well-disguised benefit for the privileged that’s underwritten by the non-privileged. Yet I’d be astonished if DOGE touched it.

Why go after the costs of Medicaid and not the costs of employer-provided health insurance? For the same reason Trump’s billionaires will happily cut taxes on themselves even as they gut health care for millions of poor kids and working-class families.

What’s considered “waste and fraud” often depends on whether one is looking downward or upward, and the billionaire DOGEs look only downward. But the biggest waste and fraud is found at the high rungs — in tax loopholes and tax expenditures used by wealthy individuals and big corporations. (Did I hear anyone say “carried interest?”)

When Trump chose Dr. Mehmet Oz, the multimillion-dollar celebrity doctor (who infamously promoted hydroxychloroquine while holding over $615,000 in shares of the drug’s distributor) to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Trump said Oz will “cut waste and fraud within our country’s most expensive government agency.”

Believe that, and you should believe in hydroxychloroquine.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

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MMA

Cable news is barely covering Trump and GOP plans to slash Medicaid

Written by Harrison Ray

Research contributions from Chloe Simon & Tyler Monroe

Published 12/10/24

Cable news networks largely ignored changes the incoming Trump administration and congressional Republicans are reportedly considering to limit access to Medicaid.

The proposals have raised alarms among health care advocates, who warn of potentially devastating impacts to vulnerable populations including children, seniors, and people with disabilities.

Since November 14, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC have given the Republicans’ potential plans only 40 minutes of coverage. MSNBC led networks with over 33 minutes coverage. However, both CNN and Fox News largely failed to cover the story. CNN devoted just 6 minutes to the potential Medicaid cuts, while Fox News devoted less than a minute of coverage.

During Trump's first term, Arkansas implemented the strictest work requirements in the country. A recent PubMed Central study of the outcomes in Arkansas said the added requirements “led to coverage losses associated with significant negative impacts on medical debt and affordability of care, without improving employment.” It added:

We find no evidence that the policy succeeded in its stated goals of promoting work and instead find substantial evidence of harm to health care coverage and access. Our results should provide a strong note of caution for federal and state policymakers considering work requirement policies in the future.

Congressional Republicans have also hinted at returning to their 2017 proposal of enacting block grants, which cap federal funding to state-level Medicaid programs. As an article from Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) explained at the time, “The potential impact [of enacting block grants] is significant. More than 10 million who got insurance through Obamacare are on Medicaid and could be affected.”

A more recent analysis from KFF explained that if Republicans went ahead with cuts to Medicaid by decreasing the federal matching rate for people covered under the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, the “health coverage implications would likely be significant.” It explained:

This financing change would shift a substantial amount of Medicaid spending from the federal government to states. States would then need to decide whether to use states funds to make up for the lost federal funding or cut coverage. Given the challenges states would face replacing substantial lost federal funds, the health coverage implications would likely be significant and could reverse gains in financial security, access to care, and health outcomes. A large body of prior research shows that Medicaid expansion has helped to reduce the uninsured and improve access, affordability, and financial security among the low-income population. More recent research shows improvements in health outcomes and continues to show positive effects for providers (particularly rural hospitals) and for sexual and reproductive health.

CNN aired only 1 segment about the GOP's plans and an additional 10 mentions, bringing the network's total coverage to just over 6 minutes.

Meanwhile, MSNBC gave the plans the most coverage, airing at least 9 segments, along with several mentions, bringing the network total to just over 33 minutes. Of any show on any network, MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes provided the most coverage of the plans, discussing them for at least 7 minutes.

Methodology...

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an 12 24

Florida leads the nation in Obamacare sign-ups as Republicans fight Medicaid expansion

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Trump's nomination of Project 2025 architect means Social Security, Medicare 'are at risk'

Jake Johnson Common Dreams 12 24

Trump's choice of Russell Vought, a Project 2025 architect, to lead the White House budget office was seen as further evidence of the threat the incoming administration poses to Social Security, Medicare, and other critical government programs.

Vought, who currently heads the far-right think tank Center for Renewing America think tank, served as director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during Trump's first term, and he's set to return to the post after playing a central role in crafting the Project 2025 agenda that the Republican president-elect attempted to disavow on the campaign trail.

In remarks to an undercover journalist earlier this year, Vought dismissed the notion that Trump opposed the aims of Project 2025, saying the Republican leader was "very supportive of what we do."

Vought is expected to aggressively pursue federal spending cuts in concert with other actors within and around the incoming Trump administration, including the "government efficiency" commission led by billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

"With the architect of Project 2025 nominated to lead Trump's Office of Management and Budget, there can be no distinction between the two."

During his tenure at OMB and as an outside adviser to Republican lawmakers, Vought advocated massive cuts to Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance, programs that the GOP is targeting as it looks to offset the costs of its proposed tax cuts.

Vought also spearheaded budget proposals from the Trump White House that recommended cuts to Social Security and Medicare, both of which the president-elect vowed to protect during his 2024 campaign.

"Vought oversaw every budget in the first Trump administration that cut Social Security and Medicare," said Tony Carrk, executive director of the watchdog group Accountable.US. "This much is clear: Social Security and Medicare are at risk in the second Trump presidency."

According to Accountable, Vought is one of at least six individuals associated with Project 2025 whom Trump has picked for a spot in the incoming administration.

"With the architect of Project 2025 nominated to lead Trump's Office of Management and Budget," said Carrk, "there can be no distinction between the two."

While Project 2025's sweeping policy document includes little discussion of Social Security, the far-right program's authors have endorsed changes such as raising the retirement age—which would result in across-the-board benefit cuts.

As for Medicare, Project 2025 proposes making privatized Medicare Advantage plans the default enrollment option for U.S. seniors, a change that would be massively profitable for insurance giants and potentially disastrous for patients.

Vought's nomination to lead OMB is expected to bolster Trump administration efforts to slash spending across the federal government. As Punchbowlreported Monday, Vought "is among those Trump allies looking to challenge Congress' authority over spending via impoundment," a strategy that Democratic lawmakers have condemned as unlawful.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, told Punchbowl in a statement that Vought "is deeply confused about this and many other points about the Constitution and the Impoundment Control Act of 1974."

"While Trump distanced himself from Project 2025, Vought's nomination makes it crystal clear that Trump lied to the American people," said DeLauro. "Trump's agenda is the Project 2025 manifesto."

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GOP’s 'plan' to increase social security age started '20 years' ago according to Mark Levin

Maya Boddie an 12 24

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HCR say we think soc sec safe bc 40 yr norms [but 2025 target?]; just bc it has not changed does not mean it can’t.

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pjt 2025?

'Hell no': Trump allies' plan to privatize Medicare draws outrage - Alternet.org

Republicans forcing 'red tape' on Medicaid recipients in election-year push for work rules - Alternet.org

note covid giving big boost to medicare for all 3/20

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AN 11 23

For a brief moment in the summer of 2023, the surprise No. 1 song “Rich Men North of Richmond” focused the country’s attention on a region that often gets overlooked in discussions of the U.S. economy. Although the U.S. media sometimes pays attention to the rural South — often concentrating on guns, religion and opioid overdoses — it has too often neglected the broad scope and root causes of the region’s current problems.

As economic historians based in North Carolina and Tennessee, we want a fuller version of the story to be told. Various parts of the rural South are struggling, but here we want to focus on the forlorn areas that the U.S. Department of Agriculture refers to as “rural manufacturing counties” — places where manufacturing is, or traditionally was, the main economic activity.

You can find such counties in every Southern state, although they were historically clustered in Alabama, Georgia, North and South Carolina, and Tennessee. And they are suffering terribly.

Yes, the South is actually in crisis

First, let’s back up. One might be tempted to ask: Are things really that bad? Hasn’t the Sun Belt been booming? But in fact, by a range of economic indicators — personal income per capita and the proportion of the population living in poverty, for starters – large parts of the South, and particularly the rural South, are struggling.

Gross domestic product per capita in the region has been stuck at about 90% of the national average for decades, with average income even lower in rural areas. About 1 in 5 counties in the South is marked by “persistent poverty” — a poverty rate that has stayed above 20% for three decades running. Indeed, fully 80% of all persistently poor counties in the U.S. are in the South.

Persistent poverty is, of course, linked to a host of other problems. The South’s rural counties are marked by low levels of educational attainment, measured both by high school and college graduation rates. Meanwhile, labor-force participation rates in the South are far lower than in the nation as a whole.

Unsurprisingly, these issues stifle economic growth.

Meanwhile, financial institutions have fled the region: The South as a whole lost 62% of its banks between 1980 and 2020, with the decline sharpest in rural areas. At the same time, local hospitals and medical facilities have been shuttering, while funding for everything from emergency services to wellness programs has been cut.

Less wealth, less health

Relatedly, the rural South is ground zero for poor health in the U.S., with life expectancy far lower than the national average. So-called “deaths of despair” such as suicides and accidental overdoses are common, and rates of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and stroke are high – much higher than in rural areas in other parts of the U.S. and in the U.S. as a whole.

Manufacturing counties in the rural South are particularly unhealthy. Residents there die about two and a half years younger than the average American, which to demographers is a staggeringly high differential.

These things, of course, didn’t happen in a vacuum. The Obama-era Affordable Care Act encouraged states to expand Medicaid coverage, but Southern states largely refused to do so. That left large portions of the low- and lower-middle-income population in the rural South uninsured. This has pushed many medical facilities in the region into a death spiral, as their business models — predicated on governmental insurance of one kind or another — became untenable.

REF

1 in 5 Americans live in rural areas

* Sources: Census Bureau, 2016; analysis of American Community Survey (ACS), 1-year estimates, 2019

Given all this, is it any wonder that rates of upward mobility in the rural South are among the lowest in the country? Alas, probably not — certainly not to residents of rural North Carolina, a state where more than half of its counties lost population between 2010 and 2020.

It wasn’t always this way

Although some people think that these areas have forever been in crisis, this isn’t the case. While the South’s agricultural sector had fallen into long-term decline in the decades following the Civil War — essentially collapsing by the Great Depression — the onset of World War II led to an impressive economic growth spurt.

War-related jobs opening up in urban areas pulled labor out of rural areas, leading to a long-delayed push to mechanize agriculture. Workers rendered redundant by such technology came to constitute a large pool of cheap labor that industrialists seized upon to deploy in low-wage processing and assembly operations, generally in rural areas and small towns.

Such operations surged between 1945 and the early 1980s, playing a huge role in the region’s economic rise. However humble they may have been, in the South — as in China since the late 1970s — the shift out of a backward agricultural sector into low-wage, low-skill manufacturing was an opportunity for significant productivity and efficiency gains.

This helped the South steadily catch up to national norms in terms of per-capita income: to 75% by 1950, 80% by the mid-1960s, over 85% by 1970, and to almost 90% by the early 1980s.

Although today the rise of the Sun Belt is often associated with, if not attributed to, climate, low housing costs and the growth of the South’s booming metropolitan areas, all those rural sweatshops and humble-looking processing sheds opening up in the early postwar era mattered a lot. They elevated the living standards of countless once-desperate and impoverished farmers.

The origins of the rural crisis

By the early 1980s, however, the gains made possible by the shift out of agriculture began to play themselves out. The growth of the rural manufacturing sector slowed, and the South’s convergence upon national per capita income norms stopped, remaining stuck at about 90% from then on.

Two factors were largely responsible: new technologies, which reduced the number of workers needed in manufacturing, and globalization, which greatly increased competition. This latter point became increasingly important, since the South, a low-cost manufacturing region in the U.S., is a high-cost manufacturing region when compared to, say, Mexico.

Like Mike Campbell’s bankruptcy in Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” the rural South’s collapse came gradually, then suddenly: gradually during the 1980s and 1990s, and suddenly after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in December 2001.

Between 2000 and 2010, for example, manufacturing employment in North Carolina, one of the South’s leading manufacturing states, fell by about 44%. Starting a bit earlier — in 1998, when the Asian currency crisis squeezed Southern manufacturers — we find that the Tar Heel State lost 70% of its manufacturing jobs in textiles and 60% in furniture between then and 2010.

Other states in the South’s “manufacturing belt,” such as South Carolina and Tennessee, lost about 40% of their manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2010. Although they have recouped some jobs since then, not one Southern state has as many manufacturing jobs as it did a generation ago. And most of the job growth in the southern manufacturing sector in recent decades has taken place in or near big cities.

The proportion of craftsmen and factory workers in the rural Southern labor force fell from 38% in 1980 to a little over 25% by 2020 — a trend that was particularly striking in rural manufacturing counties.

Factory jobs there increasingly gave way to low-level service-sector gigs, which generally paid less. As a result, median income per capita in rural manufacturing counties in the South has stagnated and is much lower than in rural manufacturing counties elsewhere in the U.S.

The first step is recognizing there’s a problem

Those parts of the rural and small-town South that were once heavily involved in manufacturing are in economic crisis today.

One might argue that the current mess is a legacy effect of the South’s historical dependence on a low-skill, low-cost growth “strategy” — beginning with slavery — that privileged short-term economic gains over patient investment in human capital and long-term development. That’s a big claim about a larger, more complex story.

For now, our aim is simply to call attention to the problem. One must first acknowledge it before there can be any hope of a remedy. Until then, the inhabitants of such areas will remain feeling, as the Southern writer Linda Flowers vividly put it, “throwed away.”

Peter A. Coclanis, Professor of History; Director of the Global Research Institute, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Louis M. Kyriakoudes, Director, Albert Gore Research Center and Professor of History, Middle Tennessee State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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see rick scott platform surrogate

biden cut ss not all, not even maj? mtg liar but

https://www.alternet.org/:{proof-republicans-social-security-medicare/}:

stand up for seniors and they did; preempted hostage?

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https://www.mediamatters.org/social-security/fox-lying-about-gop-plans-cut-social-security-and-medicare

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an 10 22

Former President Barack Obama was the keynote speaker at an event in Milwaukee on Saturday that was organized by the Democratic Party to boost turnout for its candidates in the November midterm elections.

During his speech, Obama excoriated Republican United States Senator Ron Johnson over his recent proposal to put Social Security and Medicare up for congressional review every year. Johnson has also promoted privatizing the programs, upon which millions of Americans' financial stability depends.

Johnson is a two-term incumbent locked in a tight race against Wisconsin's Democratic Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, whom Obama has endorsed.

READ MORE: 'Leftist propaganda': Ron Johnson blames higher education for debate laughter at FBI 'set up' claim

"Some of you here are on Social Security. Some of your parents are on Social Security. Some of your grandparents are on Social Security. You know why they have Social Security? Because they worked for it," a fired-up Obama said. "They worked hard jobs for it. They have chapped hands for it. They had long hours and sore backs and bad knees to get that Social Security."

The 44th commander in chief then delivered an impassioned rebuke of Johnson and his right-wing agenda.

"If Ron Johnson does not understand that – if he understands giving tax breaks for private planes more than he understands making sure that seniors who have worked all their lives are able to retire with dignity and respect – he’s not the person who’s thinking about you and knows you and sees you. And he should not be your senator from Wisconsin," Obama orated. "I mean, the message he's sending is pretty clear. If you're related to him, if you donate to his campaign, you get a deal. And if not, you're outta luck and you're on your own."

Watch below or at this link.

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ron j 5 yr --> annual renewal vote

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an 922

House Republicans are set to release their policy platform that includes a critical assessment of Democrats' proposal to reduce the cost of popular prescription drugs as they propose cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

In a piece published by HuffPost, writers Paul Blumenthal and Jonathan Nicholson reported about a document leaked on Wednesday, September 21.

Per the writers' report, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) planned to announce the Republicans' “Commitment to America” agenda. However, the writers noted, "a multi-page document bearing that name briefly appeared online Wednesday on McCarthy’s website."

READ MORE: Legal expert: Trump's dealings with Truth Social merger may have violated the law

Shortly after the document was released and shared via Twitter by New York Times reporter Annie Karni, the viewing capabilities were changed on the site and it became password protected. However, multiple screenshots were taken. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) also took to Twitter with screenshots of Republicans' proposed platform.

Per HuffPost, "The website placed policies into four separate categories: economic policies; immigration and national security; schools, health care, and technology; and an amorphous grouping of so-called government reforms."

"The GOP document promises to 'fight inflation and curb the cost of living,' but the only policies it proposes are federal government spending cuts. It also promises to cut taxes, which could increase inflation, and government regulations," the writers also noted.

More details about the platform were specified. "The platform also promises to 'save and strengthen Social Security and Medicare,' but lists no policies to do so. In June, Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee held a roundtable on Social Security where they discussed policies that would reduce coverage and cut benefits to seniors," the writers reported. "The Republican Study Committee, a bloc of conservative House GOP lawmakers, included a plan to massively slash Social Security in its proposed 2023 budget."

READ MORE: The question is no longer whether Trump’s MAGA movement is fascist — but can we defeat it?

In wake of the reports about the policy platform announcement, McCarthy acted as if he was unaware of the rollout. Speaking to HuffPost on Wednesday, McCarthy said hadn't seen it.

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when up for re-election?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/ron-johnson-targets-medicare-and-social-security-for-annual-budget-discussions/

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miissouri judge sides with GOP governor to block Medicaid expansion and override the will of voters

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/medicaid-2653529375/

In 2020, voters in Missouri approved a ballot measure that called for Medicaid expansion in the midwestern state. But on June 23, a judge ruled that the voter was unconstitutional.

If the expansion went through on July 1, it would expand Medicaid to roughly 275,000 adults in the Missouri. But Republican Gov. Mike Parson, in May, announced that the expansion wouldn't be funded, and Missouri Democrats slammed Parson for defying the will of the voters. A lawsuit was filed on behalf of three Missouri residents with chronic health conditions who cannot afford treatment.

But Judge Jon Beetem of the Cole County Circuit Court sided with Parson, ruling, "The court concludes that the state's refusal to enroll plaintiffs and other eligible individuals in the MO HealthNet program is not unlawful. Notwithstanding a majority vote of the people, an initiative which does not comply with the limits of the Constitution cannot stand."

According to CNN reporter Tami Luhby, Chuck Hatfield — an attorney representing the three plaintiffs in the lawsuit — said he plans to appeal Beetem's ruling all the way to the Missouri Supreme Court.

When Parson announced, in May, that the Medicaid expansion lacked funding, the Republican governor said, "Although I was never in support of MO HealthNet expansion, I always said that I would uphold the ballot amendment if passed. However, without a revenue source or funding authority from the (Missouri) General Assembly, we are unable to proceed with the expansion at this time and must withdraw our State Plan Amendments to ensure Missouri's existing MO HealthNet program remains solvent."

In the United States, millions of people who are either self-employed or do not have health coverage through their jobs have obtained health insurance through the Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare. But Luhby notes that some uninsured Americans find themselves in a "coverage gap" — a problem the Medicaid expansion in Missouri was designed to address.

Luhby explains, "More than 2 million uninsured adults fall into the 'coverage gap,' meaning their incomes were too high to qualify in their states but too low to make them eligible for Affordable Care Act premium subsidies, which are open only to those earning more than 100% of the poverty level in non-expansion states."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/missouri-gop-leaves-gov-mike-parson-in-political-bind-amid-vote-on-senate-medicaid/

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/tennessee/

no lnx twt

Trump administration approves Tennessee's 'reckless' plan to slash Medicaid as pandemic rages

Portrait of Seema Verma, President-elect Donald Trump's choice for Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator

Andrea Germanos and Common Dreams January 10, 2021

Healthcare advocates are criticizing the Trump administration's approval—amid overwhelming opposition, a global pandemic, and as the number of uninsured Americans grows—of Tennessee's plan to overhaul funding of its Medicaid program, calling the decision "reckless" and "irresponsible."

Joan Alker, executive director of the Georgetown Center for Children and Families, called it "a radical waiver that puts Tennessee's Medicaid beneficiaries at risk."

The state's Medicaid program, TennCare, covers 1.5 million people, or about one in five of the state's residents. The proposal would "fundamentally" transform how TennCare is managed and funded, The Tennessean reported. When Republican Gov. Bill Lee rolled out the plan in fall, the outlet added, the state received 1,800 written comments, of which just 11 were in support.

Kaiser Health News reported:

With just a dozen days left in power, the Trump administration on Friday approved a radically different Medicaid financing system in Tennessee that for the first time would give the state broader authority in running the health insurance program for the poor in exchange for capping its annual federal funding.

The approval is a 10-year "experiment." Instead of the open-ended federal funding that rises with higher enrollment and health costs, Tennessee will instead get an annual block grant. The approach has been pushed for decades by conservatives who say states too often chafe under strict federal guidelines about enrollment and coverage and can find ways to provide care more efficiently.

But under the agreement, Tennessee's annual funding cap will increase if enrollment grows. What's different is that unlike other states, federal Medicaid funding in Tennessee won't automatically keep up with rising per-person Medicaid expenses.

The approval, however, faces an uncertain future because the incoming Biden administration is likely to oppose such a move. But to unravel it, officials would need to set up a review that includes a public hearing.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced the approval Friday. "It's no exaggeration to say that this carefully crafted demonstration could be a national model moving forward," said CMS Administrator Seema Verma—a Trump appointed official who's pushed attacks on Medicaid and has been described as "the architect of Indiana's punitive restrictions on Medicaid patients."

Michele Johnson, executive director of the Tennessee Justice Center, said in response to the approval that "no other state has sought a block grant, and for good reason," and warned of its impacts to those "in nursing homes, those struggling with mental illness, diabetes, cancer, and countless other complex conditions."

"Tennessee is one of a handful of states still denying Medicaid to its working uninsured, and the block grant is just another example of putting politics ahead of healthcare during this pandemic," said Johnson. "It's a political gimmick that jeopardizes access to healthcare for hundreds of thousands of Tennesseans by creating a state budget booby trap."

"State officials have an abysmal record of mismanaging programs that help those in need. The block grant will allow these same state officials to inflict further damage on Tennessee's healthcare system," she said.

The approval also drew outrage from a coalition of 21 patient and consumer groups including the American Lung Association, American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, and National Alliance on Mental Illness. They called the plan's approval "a reckless move that would reduce Tennesseans' ability to get needed healthcare" and urged the incoming Biden administration to halt its implementation.

"Our organizations have clearly and repeatedly voiced our deep concerns with Tennessee's proposal, as well as our strong opposition to block grants in Medicaid in general," the groups said Friday in a joint statement. "Per capita caps and block grants are designed to cap or limit the amount of federal funding provided to states, forcing them to either make up the difference with their own funds or make cuts to their programs reducing access to care for the patients we represent."

Such cuts, they warned, "will likely result in enrollment limits, benefit reductions, reductions in provider payments, or increased out-of-pocket cost-sharing for Medicaid enrollees. The approval specifically includes authority to limit prescription drug coverage, a dangerous proposal for patients."

Referencing the coronavirus pandemic, the groups added, "It is irresponsible to approve this waiver during this public health crisis, and especially to do so for an unprecedented 10-year period." Implementation of the plan stands to "limit Tennessee's flexibility in responding to recessions, pandemics, new treatments, and natural disasters," and thus "moves in the opposite direction of the lessons learned from 2020."

The Tennessean further noted:

The block grant approval, negotiated over about a year with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, still must get final approval from state lawmakers before it can be implemented. Lee now intends to present a joint resolution on the plan for the General Assembly's "immediate consideration," according to a news release.

The Tennessee Justice Center is urging its supporters to pressure lawmakers to block the plan.

"We are not surprised but are unsettled by this eleventh-hour action by the federal government during the height of the pandemic," said Jane Perkins, legal director for the National Health Law Program. "The approval raises so many issues," she said, "from the process the government used to approve this project to the specifics of how the government has cut into the healthcare safety net. Our legal team is investigating the enforcement and litigation options at this time."

Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over Medicaid, also sounded alarm.

"This is an illegal move that could threaten access to healthcare for vulnerable people in the middle of a pandemic," Pallone tweeted Friday. He also expressed hope the incoming Biden administration would "move quickly to roll back this harmful policy as soon as possible."

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losing sr cits bigly

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trump-attempting-to-raid-medicare-trust-fund-in-shameless-stunt-to-pay-for-drug-discount-cards-report/

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north Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis — viewed as one of the most vulnerable GOP senators in 2020 — has found himself in an uncomfortable situation after a staffer’s excessively honest comments to a constituent were caught on tape.

As first reported by WRAL, Bev Veals of Carolina Beach, a three-time cancer survivor, called her senator out of fear that her health insurance was at risk. She has previously faced medical bankruptcy and difficulty accessing care, WRAL said, andher husband was furloughed because of the pandemic. She wanted assurance that she’d have coverage if she lost her health insurance.

But Tillis’s office wasn’t helpful. While speaking to a dismissive staffer, Veals began to record their conversation, which was provided to WRAL and can be viewed above.

“You’re saying that, if you can’t afford it, you don’t get to have it?” she asked. “That includes health care?'

"Yeah, just like if I want to go to the store and buy a new dress shirt. If I can’t afford that dress shirt, I don’t get to get it,” the staffer explained.

“But health care is something that people need!” Veals said, clearly alarmed. “Especially if they have cancer.”

“Well, you got to find a way to get it,” the staffer said.

“So what do I do in the meantime, sir?” she asked, not hiding the irritation in her voice.

The response was snide: “Sounds like something you’re going to have to figure it out.”

Tillis’s office has apologized after Veals came forward about the exchange: “The way Mrs. Veals was talked to by a staff assistant in our Washington office was completely inappropriate and violates the code of conduct Senator Tillis has for his staff, which is why immediate disciplinary action has been taken.”

But the truth is that, insensitive and rude as the staffer’s comments to Veals were, they were simply a much more honest reflection of the Republican Party’s policies on health care than officials typically admit. But the truth isn’t hard to see. The Trump administration is currently arguing that the Supreme Court should overturn all of Obamacare, throwing millions of people off their insurance and invalidating protections for pre-existing conditions, along with other provisions that protect patients.

The unofficial Republican Party policy, though, is to lie about this fact. Trump is constantly telling voters that he protected pre-existing conditions — even though he has done nothing to ensure they’re covered — and that he’ll continue to keep these protections in place, even though he’s trying to destroy them.

The Tillis staffer, apparently, didn’t get the message. He has imbibed the attitude at the heart of the GOP’s policy preferences. His mistake was being honest with a member of the public about the policy.

Veals, for one, doesn’t seem deceived by the office’s apology. And that’s because she still hasn’t gotten the original answer to the question she called about.

“We need our legislators to listen to us and help us solve this problem because it’s not just my problem – not being able to afford health care,” she told WRAL. “It’s the problem of hundreds and thousands of North Carolinians.”

North Carolina is one of 12 states in the U.S. that has not adopted Medicaid expansion, a policy that would help cover people like Veals if they lost their insurance. Tillis opposes Medicaid expansion.

In a statement to WRAL, Tillis dishonestly defended his position:

“When he was Speaker of the House [in North Carolina],” the statement continues, “Senator Tillis inherited a Medicaid program that was mismanaged and plagued with overspending and inefficiency. Expanding Medicaid at the time would have been a promise that the state wouldn’t have been able to keep, requiring cuts to the program that would have harmed patients that states like New York and California have already been forced to make. Instead, Senator Tillis worked to strengthen the state’s Medicaid program to deliver quality health care to patients, and the reason the North Carolina is in a position to discuss expansion is because of Senator Tillis’ leadership.”

These claims are in spectacularly bad faith. Medicaid expansion has been wildly successful across the United States — it can even save states money. And claiming to be concerned about “cuts to the program” that harm patients is absurd when patients like Veals can be left with no coverage at all. It’s even more pernicious, though, because the recent stressed on state budgets in the wake of the pandemic come from the Senate Republicans’ refusal to provide recovery funds to state and local governments, as Democrats have sought to do.

It’s these comments — far more than a staffer’s rudeness — that should be the real scandal.

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but trump says will cut payroll deduction covid but stealth attack on SS?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-just-admitted-on-live-television-he-will-terminate-social-security-and-medicare-if-he-wins-reelection/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/cruelty-off-the-charts-as-trump-blocks-states-from-expanding-medicaid-to-fight-coronavirus/

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Trump is trying to break a 2016 promise about the social safety net

Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security are among the most popular federal programs out there. A 2019 Pew Research poll showed majorities across all parties and demographics opposing cuts to Social…

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/code-for-massive-cuts-audio-shows-gops-sen-joni-ernst-telling-donors-she-wants-changes-to-medicare-and-medicaid

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/blatant-lie-seema-verma-claims-trump-not-cutting-medicaid-as-he-pushes-plan-doing-just-that/

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trump looks to take an axe to Medicaid — and people will die as a result

Jake Johnson / Common Dr

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capt 220 no lnx

socialsec220

social security medicare (htlm fail)

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3/18 medicare medicaid 2 disambig

see social safety net

bak 919 bak 2020 html fixed

promote primary 919 as proxy for fights, plus aha moderation ~ inequality, commons

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/blatant-lie-seema-verma-claims-trump-not-cutting-medicaid-as-he-pushes-plan-doing-just-that/

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trump looks to take an axe to Medicaid — and people will die as a result

Jake Johnson / Common Dr

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timing bizzaRE unles smash and grab window?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/the-trump-administration-just-declared-war-on-social-security/

no lnx

The Trump Administration just declared war on social security

Social Security Commissioner Andrew Saul, Image via Screengrab CSPAN.

Written by Alex Lawson / Independent Media Institute December 18, 2019

American workers contribute to Social Security with every paycheck. When they do, they are earning comprehensive insurance protections. Social Security insures against the loss of wages due to old age, disability, or (for the surviving family of a worker) death. While Social Security is best known as a retirement program, disability and survivor’s benefits are equally essential.

An attack on any part of Social Security is an attack on the entire system and all current and future beneficiaries. The latest proposal from Donald Trump’s administration, which is designed to rip benefits away from hundreds of thousands of Americans with disabilities, amounts to a declaration of war on Social Security.

The Trump administration proposal would require millions of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) beneficiaries to re-prove their eligibility for benefits as often as every six months—far more frequently than is currently the case. There is no justification for this policy. The United States already has some of the strictest eligibility criteria for disability benefits in the world. More than half of all claims are denied.

We should be making it easier for workers to claim the Social Security benefits they’ve earned with every paycheck, not harder. And ripping benefits away from current beneficiaries, who rely on them to survive, is even worse.

We know what the effects of the Trump proposal would be, because Ronald Reagan implemented a very similar benefit cut back in the 1980s. Reagan’s policy ripped away the benefits of 200,000 Americans with disabilities. The New York Times reported that “people with obvious physical and mental disabilities” lost their benefits “without having been interviewed.”

Ultimately, Reagan was forced to reverse his attack on Social Security after massive public outcry, and bipartisan condemnation from Congress—but not before 21,176 people died, including several who died by suicide, “because their benefits were cut off.”

Donald Trump himself might not be a diligent student of history, but his advisers—men like Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s chief of staff and a longtime enemy of Social Security—know exactly what they are doing. They want to resurrect Reagan’s Social Security cut knowing full well that it killed people.

This could impact any of us, even those of us who are currently healthy. Imagine that you are hit by a car tomorrow, and suffer life-altering injuries that prevent you from working. You’re faced with crushing medical bills, and you’ve lost your income. In such situations, SSDI benefits are a crucial lifeline. Donald Trump wants to rip that lifeline away.

Trump and Mulvaney are targeting people with disabilities first, because they perceive them as politically vulnerable. But if they are allowed to get away with this attack, it will be only the beginning. They want to destroy every part of Social Security, including retirement benefits, and turn it over to their criminal friends on Wall Street.

We must stop Trump’s plan. The Social Security Administration is collecting comments on the proposal until the end of January. You can comment opposing the plan here. Everyone must also call their elected officials. Congressional condemnation played a huge role in forcing Ronald Reagan to reverse his version of the attack, and it can stop Trump in his tracks.

If we let the politicians in Washington, D.C., take away some people’s earned benefits, it means they can take away all of our earned benefits.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Alex Lawson is the executive director of Social Security Works, a non-profit advocacy group that supports expanding benefits to address America’s growing retirement security crisis. Lawson has appeared on numerous TV and radio outlets and is a frequent guest host of The Thom Hartmann Program, one of the top progressive radio shows in the country.

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national disgrace’: Trump proposes Social Security change that could end disability benefits for hundreds of thousands

"The Trump administration is attacking another vulnerable population: those who…

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/trump-just-launched-a-stealth-attack-on-medicare/

no lnx many

Trump just launched a stealth attack on Medicare

Written by Diane Archer / Common Dreams October 7, 2019

Watch out, older Americans and people with disabilities! President Trump just announced a plan to give corporate health insurers more control over your health care. His new executive order calls for “market-based” pricing, which would drive up costs for everyone with Medicare, eviscerate traditional Medicare, and steer more people into for-profit “Medicare Advantage” plans.

Seema Verma, the Trump appointee who heads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), may not have warned Trump about the slew of government audits revealing that many Medicare Advantage plans pose “an imminent and serious risk to the health of… enrollees.” They also overcharge taxpayers to the tune of $10 billion a year.

In the last few years alone, CMS’ limited audits have highlighted major issues with Medicare Advantage plans. Reports from the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and Government Accountability Office (GAO) have underscored these issues. They have recommended that CMS increase its oversight of Medicare Advantage plans and its enforcement efforts.

A Medicare Payment Advisory Commission report indicates that the problems with Medicare Advantage may be even more far-reaching than the government audits indicate. The Medicare Advantage plans have failed to turn over reliable and complete claims data, as required by law. Without this data, it’s not possible to know whether they are covering the health care services they are paid to provide or to oversee them to the extent necessary.

Last month, Senators Sherrod Brown, Amy Klobuchar, Chris Murphy, Richard Blumenthal, Bernie Sanders and Debbie Stabenow laid out several serious malfeasances by these corporate Medicare insurers—including UnitedHealth Group, Aetna, Cigna and Humana—in a detailed letter they sent to Verma.

The insurers’ wrongdoings are systematic. They are ongoing. They endanger the health and financial well-being of millions of people. They undermine the financial integrity of the Medicare program and harm the U.S. Treasury. Yet, to date, CMS has failed to develop, let alone execute, a plan to hold these insurers accountable for violating their legal obligations and to ensure their members get the health care to which they are entitled.

Tens of billions in overcharges are one big problem. Medicare Advantage plans have been overcharging the government for their services for many years now, by claiming that their members are in worse health than they actually are in order to increase payments. To make matters worse, they have refused to pay back the tens of billions in overpayments that the federal government has made to them. UnitedHealth successfully fought to keep the government from collecting this money.

Another major concern is that Medicare Advantage plans are failing to cover the care their members need and are entitled to. Government audits show that Medicare Advantage plans are inappropriately delaying and denying care and coverage to hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of their members. This puts patients’ health and safety at risk. Thousands of people end up paying for care that should have been covered—or foregoing care altogether.

CMS has not named or flagged these corporate health plans on its Medicare website or notified people in any other way of plans with serious violations, as it had agreed to do at the recommendation of the Office of the Inspector General. So, people with Medicare are unaware when they enroll in a Medicare Advantage plan that the government has found to be jeopardizing the health and safety of its members. Instead, CMS continues to give four- and five-star ratings to some of these health plans. In the process, it misleads older adults and people with disabilities about their performance.

What’s more, CMS has found that a sizeable number of Medicare Advantage plans have for years issued highly inaccurate provider directories; and, the GAO has noted “concerns about ensuring enrollee access to care.” Many of these health plans have narrowed their provider networks. GAO suggests that it is not at all clear which of these Medicare Advantage plans have an adequate number and mix of health care providers in their networks.

To date, the Trump administration has been steering people into Medicare Advantage plans, without regard to their deficiencies. And, it has failed to provide people with Medicare with meaningful information about their health plan choices as required by law. It is on a reckless path, promoting the business interests of Medicare Advantage plans that violate the law over the health care needs of vulnerable Americans.

The administration and its congressional allies are playing a game of bait and switch with older adults and people with disabilities. They allow Medicare Advantage plans to lure people with benefits that traditional Medicare does not offer, such as dental care and transportation services to the doctor, without exposing their failings. The Trump administration’s goal is to fully privatize Medicare and shift more costs onto older and disabled Americans.

To be clear, Trump’s executive order does nothing to hold the Medicare Advantage plans accountable for their fraudulent overcharges or their inappropriate denials of care and coverage. Rather, it rewards them. It gives them even more discretion regarding the services they cover and the freedom to create new bells and whistles to lure in members. The health and financial well-being of older and disabled Americans hangs in the balance.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/how-american-inequality-follows-us-to-the-grave/

no lnx

How American inequality follows us to the grave

Written by Independent Media Institute September 13, 2019

by Tom Conway

Regular exercise and an apple a day may help to keep the doctor away. But to live a long, healthy life, it helps to be rich.

Income inequality is a pox on America. The rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer. CEO pay keeps rising while workers’ paychecks have been all but flat for decades. As a result, income inequality now rivals that of the robber baron days of the early 1900s, when labor unions were virtually outlawed while corporate monopolies thrived.

It gets worse. It turns out that low income is an actual pox, killing people before their time. The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found in a study released on September 9 that poor people live shorter lives than rich people.

This is appalling. And preventable.

Researchers at the GAO discovered that poor people are doomed to an early death. They tracked a group of people who were in their 50s in 1992—and found that that the wealthier members of the group were much more likely than the poorer ones to be alive in 2014.

Money may not be able to buy happiness, but it can buy longevity.

The early death effect of poverty plays out in whole neighborhoods and towns. Take the coal community of McDowell County, West Virginia, where the poverty rate is nearly 32 percent. As of 2016, a man’s life expectancy there was 63.9 years, the lowest among U.S. counties.

By organizing themselves into unions, workers can buy themselves more time on earth. That’s because median weekly earnings of union workers are about 22 percent higher than those of nonunion workers—$1,051 compared to $860, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Organized labor also fights to get workers better health insurance and retirement benefits. Unions work to make workplaces safer and to hold companies responsible for unsafe conditions so workers don’t die on the job.

Unions lift people out of poverty and narrow income inequality. They help to close racial- and gender-based pay gaps. People with decent incomes and benefits are better able to access health care, afford healthy food and enjoy comfortable retirements.

The opposite also is true. The lower rate of unionism in recent years has allowed income inequality to grow, and that has led, as the GAO study shows, to disparities in life expectancy. Even the Grim Reaper favors the rich.

Because unions help build the middle class, government used to support them, especially under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s and 40s. But not now.

Now, organized labor is under attack. President Trump’s National Labor Relations Board has made a series of anti-worker decisions that includes denying unions access to an employer’s public spaces, such as hospital cafeterias; denying SuperShuttle drivers the right to organize; and allowing employers to withdraw recognition of unions before negotiations for a new contract begin.

GOP-controlled legislatures in states ranging from Wisconsin to West Virginia have passed so-called right-to-work laws that allow workers to benefit from union contracts without joining the union and paying dues and without even paying smaller fees charged to non-members to cover the cost of union services such as negotiations and grievance cases.

And last year, the U.S. Supreme Court, packed with Republican appointees, issued the Janus decision that made the entire country right-to-work for public-sector workers. In all 50 states now, public-sector workers who don’t join unions can pay nothing but still enjoy the higher wages and other benefits that dues-paying members get.

As right-wingers legislated away union rights over the past four decades, the power of unions declined, and the middle class became stuck. U.S. Census Bureau data released on September 10 show that middle-class wages are roughly the same now as 20 years ago.

That’s two decades of stagnation. For workers, not CEOs. Since 1978, CEO pay packages have risen nearly 940 percent.

Eight executives at Philadelphia Energy Solutions illustrate how the rich look out for themselves while stiffing everyone else. Together, those executives received almost $4.6 million in retention bonuses on the heels of the June 21 explosion and fire that shut down the refinery, pushed the company into bankruptcy and put about 1,000 employees—many of them members of United Steelworkers Local 10-1—on the street without pay or health insurance.

The employees were the ones who risked their lives the day of the disaster by taking quick action to prevent the release of lethal hydrofluoric acid, saving untold lives inside the plant and across Philadelphia.

The executives who operated the plant—and were ultimately responsible for the fire and explosion—got a big payoff. The workers got pink slips.

This kind of rapacity is so pervasive that it might actually be hurting the economy. Money is being concentrated in the hands of super-rich people who are more likely to invest it than spend it, and that can affect growth.

At the other end of the spectrum are people like those in the GAO study who died younger than they deserved.

Many of them relied on Social Security to scrape by in retirement. The poorest people in the group didn’t own homes or even cars. They had only what social insurance programs provided.

Like labor unions, these programs are under attack.

The Trump administration has so weakened Obamacare that the portion of Americans without health insurance increased last year.

And after Congress gave rich people and corporations that huge tax cut in 2017, Republican leaders talked about cutting Social Security and Medicare to pay for it. They didn’t do it yet, but the fight isn’t over.

Sen. Joni Ernst, a Republican from Iowa, recently suggested that Congress meet behind closed doors to discuss “changes” in Social Security. She said she feared public backlash from having the conversation in public. More specifically, she said she didn’t want to look like she was pushing “granny over a cliff.”

Sen. Ernst’s flippancy speaks volumes. It shows how little she and other Republicans think of the grannies and grandpas, dads and moms, and working men and women who have broken their backs to pay taxes and provide for their families.

Some will struggle all of their working lives, still be unable to save anything for retirement and die early deaths. Sen. Ernst needs to wake up. The Republicans’ pro-wealth, anti-labor and anti-social welfare campaigns are pushing people over a cliff before they live long enough to become grannies.

Tom Conway is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW).

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/republicans-want-to-cut-social-security-behind-closed-doors/

no lnx

Republicans want to cut Social Security ‘behind closed doors’

Written by Nancy J. Altman / Independent Media Institute September 5, 2019

Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) just said out loud what Republican politicians usually only talk about in secret meetings with their billionaire donors: The GOP wants to cut our earned Social Security benefits—and they want to do it behind closed doors so that they don’t have to pay the political price.

At a recent town hall, Ernst stated that Congress needs to “sit down behind closed doors” to “address Social Security.” She vaguely asserted, “A lot of changes need to be made in this system going forward.” But, she complained, if these changes were proposed in public, she would be accused of pushing “granny over a cliff.” It is not hard to figure out what “changes” she has in mind.

There are many “changes” that should be made to strengthen Social Security and make it even better than it already is. But none of those have to be done secretly.

Congress should address our nation’s looming retirement income crisis by increasing Social Security’s modest benefits. Congress should combat rising income and wealth inequality, by requiring the wealthiest Americans to contribute to Social Security at the same rate as the rest of us.

Congress should enact caregiver credits for those who perform essential but unpaid labor caring for their children, aged parents, and other family members. Those crucial caregivers should receive credit toward future Social Security benefits so they don’t retire into poverty.

In addition, Congress should update the way that Social Security’s benefits are adjusted so that they reflect the high health care and prescription drug costs that beneficiaries experience. The annual cost of living adjustment is intended to keep benefits from eroding, to allow beneficiaries to tread water. But without updating the measure of inflation, those benefits are losing value each year.

Those are just some of the improvements that Congress should make. But those are not the “changes” Ernst has in mind, because none of those changes need to be done behind closed doors. Numerous pieces of legislation proposing those changes have been introduced in Congress—though none by Senator Ernst or her Republican colleagues.

Indeed, 210 House Democrats have co-sponsored the Social Security 2100 Act, which expands Social Security’s modest benefits, while ensuring that all benefits can be paid in full and on time through the year 2100 and beyond. Every Democratic presidential candidate opposes cutting Social Security benefits, and nearly all support expanding them. Meanwhile, neither Donald Trump nor a single Republican member of Congress is sponsoring or cosponsoring any legislation that increases benefits or even ensures that they can be paid in full and on time beyond 2035.

No action is the same as supporting cuts. As Representative John Larson (D-CT), chairman of the House’s Social Security Subcommittee and the author of the Social Security 2100 Act, has explained, “The hard truth of the matter is that Republicans want to cut Social Security, and doing nothing achieves their goal.”

Larson and his Democratic colleagues are calling Republicans’ bluff. Under Democratic control, Congress has held numerous hearings on Social Security and the importance of protecting and expanding it. Larson and his Democratic colleagues are planning to have a recorded, public vote on the Social Security 2100 Act this fall.

The legislation has enough votes to pass the House of Representatives. But don’t expect Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to bring it to a vote in the Senate. And don’t expect Senator Ernst or her other Republican colleagues to urge him to do so.

With respect to Social Security, just as with the issue of legislating background checks and other overwhelmingly popular commonsense legislation to reduce the epidemic of gun violence, Republican politicians will not say what they are for. In the case of gun legislation, they block action. In the case of Social Security, they block action unless Democrats agree to go behind closed doors so the public doesn’t know who pushed the cuts.

We should not let Republican politicians get by with platitudes about “saving” and “fixing” Social Security. And we certainly shouldn’t let them hide behind closed doors and undermine our Social Security.

As polarized as the American people are over many issues, we are not polarized about Social Security. Republicans, Democrats and Independents, of all ages, races and genders, overwhelmingly agree. We understand that Social Security is more important than ever. We overwhelmingly reject any cuts to its modest benefits.

The only group that disagrees is Republican Party donors. As an ideological matter, they hate Social Security because it puts the lie to their assertions that government can’t work. They do not want to pay their fair share. Indeed, they would love to get their hands on the money now flowing to Social Security.

When President George W. Bush proposed destroying Social Security by privatizing it, the American people overwhelmingly rejected his plan. But Republican politicians learned the wrong lesson. As unpopular as Bush’s proposal was, he was at least willing to advocate for it publicly. Rather than recognize the proposal was the problem, Ernst and her fellow Republicans think the problem was being honest with the American people.

Like Bush, they want to enact a Social Security proposal that is deeply unpopular. But unlike Bush, they want to enact it in the dark of night. Fortunately, their Democratic colleagues won’t let them get away with that undemocratic act. Nor should the American people.

All of us who have a stake in Social Security—which is every one of us—should insist that those seeking our vote tell us if they support expanding or cutting Social Security. If they refuse to tell us, if they ramble on about their desire to “save” or “fix” or “strengthen” Social Security in secret, we should draw the obvious inference: They want to cut Social Security. We should use the election to ensure they do not have the power to do that—and certainly not behind closed doors.

Nancy J. Altman is a writing fellow for Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. She has a 40-year background in the areas of Social Security and private pensions. She is president of Social Security Works and chair of the Strengthen Social Security coalition. Her latest book is The Truth About Social Security. She is also the author of The Battle for Social Security and co-author of Social Security Works!

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/republican-attacks-on-the-social-security-2100-act-are-an-assault-on-public-health/

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/the-trump-administrations-insidious-plan-to-cut-social-security-benefits/

Trump administration, continuing its assaults on the most vulnerable Americans, is now going after disabled people with limited English proficiency. Dependent children of people who become disabled are among those likely to be hurt by the new rule.

The rule, not yet in effect, would deny Social Security disability benefits to people whose language difficulty makes them unemployable in the market, but who Team  Trump thinks should be able to find jobs where an inability to speak or understand instructions is only a minor problem, citing among other examples cook and gardener.... The proposed rule contradicts another Trump rule change. Both rules are squarely aimed at immigrants.

The proposed Social Security rule change is the latest example showing that to Team Trump no one is too poor, too powerless or too far down the economic ladder to escape their malicious attention.

People with difficulty speaking in any language could be denied benefits, opponents argue.

"We’re very concerned at how this administration is chipping away” at benefits for people, said Jenna McDavid of the Diverse Elders Coalition.

Hidden Intention

Buried deep in the Federal Register notice is the point of the rule change, which “would revise ‘Illiterate or unable to communicate in English’ to simply ‘Illiterate.’”

We’ve linked to the administration’s pending new rule explanation in the Federal Register, a difficult to comprehend government publication which I review frequently. This explanation stands out as one of the most verbose and obtuse proposed rule changes I’ve ever read because the explanation is designed to obscure the purpose.

The existing 40-year-old rule says “limited education means ability in reasoning, arithmetic, and language skills, but not enough to allow a person with these educational qualifications to do most of the more complex job duties needed in semi-skilled or skilled jobs.”

The rule change comes at a time when, the Trump administration says, the share of American workers with limited English proficiency is growing.

“The working-age population (ages 25–64) with [limited English proficiency] increased from approximately 5.4 to 17.8 million between 1980 and 2016, while more than doubling, from 5.1% to 10.5%, as a percentage of the population,” the notice of the proposed rule change stated. “Within this group, the number of individuals who spoke no English more than quadrupled from approximately 682,000 to 2.8 million” people.”

McDavid noted that the Trump administration has taken diametrically opposed positions on the value of English proficiency.

In a proposed rule to turn away people at the border, Team Trump asserted “an inability to speak and understand English may adversely affect whether an [immigrant] can obtain employment.” But in the proposed Social Security rule, McDavid pointed out, “the Administration claims that ability to speak English is irrelevant for an individual’s ability to find employment.”

No Definition of ‘Illiteracy’

One anonymous commentator noted that the proposed rule fails to define illiteracy. That would matter if the government argued that someone who can read and write in their native tongue is literate even if they cannot communicate in English, creating grounds to deny benefits.

About one in five Americans speak a language other than English at home. And about 25 million Americans, or one in 13, have limited proficiency in English.

Some of the 241 people who filed comments favor denying benefits to disabled people who are not proficient in English.

“There is no reason for them not to be able to communicate in the English language,” Peter Alamillo III wrote. “Children are taught English in school, either public or private. There is no reason for applicants for survivors [sic] benefits, etc. to have an inability to communicate in English.”

He said the proposed new rule “is a very prudent change that will help to save the SSA money for individuals and programs that truly need it instead of wasting it on foolhardy and unnecessary non-essential matters.”

Poor and Sick

Others noted that individuals lacking proficiency in English are more likely to be poor and suffer ill unhealth, among them Karla Guerra, writing on behalf of a community organization in Oakland, Calif. “The implementation of this proposal would result in diminished opportunities for health for disabled LEP individuals and their families,” she wrote.

Emily Voelker complained that the new rule “would mean that over 10,000 disabled and low-English proficient workers per year would no longer qualify for and receive benefits when they are unable to work. It’s discrimination that helps no one – and only hurts people who are already vulnerable to prejudice.

Perhaps the most direct and damning comment was filed by Margo Vanderhill:

“This proposed rule is clearly discriminatory. Many Native Americans cannot speak English (due to living in very isolated regions). They are not immigrants yet [they] would be affected by this rule.

“Other immigrants (documented and legal) may not be able to speak English, but that in no way should bar them from assistance. They may be unable to speak English because of emotional or intellectual disabilities. That does not diminish their qualifications for disability.

The proposed rule change does indicate racial bias and Xenophobic attitudes for those proposing the change.”

Yup. That’s standard operating procedure for this administration, which propagates harm using language that even those highly proficient in English find nearly incomprehensible.

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The remarkable Mothers of Social Security

Nancy J. Altman / Independent Media Institute

This Mother’s Day, let’s celebrate the remarkable Mothers of Social Security. Without them, this essential program may never have been born. It certainly would be much less successful and effective.…

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/a-federal-judge-just-struck-a-blow-to-the-trump-administrations-cruel-plot-to-gut-medicaid/

On Wednesday, a federal judge dealt a massive blow to one of the Trump administration’s pet projects.

Washington, D.C. District Court judge James Boasberg struck down work requirements in Kentucky and Arkansas, ruling that the waivers granted by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar were not valid because work requirements do not further the Medicaid Act’s mission of improving public health.

The rules differ in some ways, but both broadly require certain Medicaid recipients to complete a minimum number of work or community service hours each month and provide proof to the state.

Kentucky’s work requirement, known as Kentucky HEALTH, was the first to be approved by the Trump administration but was struck down last year by the same judge, and the newly revised rules were scheduled to take effect on April 1. Arkansas has already implemented its work requirement system, known as Arkansas Works, with disastrous consequences — over 18,000 people in the state have lost Medicaid coverage, many of whom actually were working but couldn’t figure out how to meet the state’s confusing reporting requirements, especially those in rural areas who don’t have easy access to the internet.

Boasberg criticized Arkansas for doing virtually nothing to help Medicaid recipients understand and comply with the new work requirement, saying “the State’s outreach efforts may well be falling severely short.” He further criticized Kentucky, which argued that their work requirement does further the mission of expanding health coverage because Gov. Matt Bevin intended to cancel Medicaid expansion entirely if he didn’t get his way: “The Court cannot concur that … states are so armed to refashion the program Congress designed in any way they choose.”

Several other Republican-controlled states are currently seeking approval for similar work requirement programs.

Medicaid is a joint federal-state program — both Congress and the states provide funding, and the states are in charge of administering the program within their borders. The Medicaid Act sets strict guidelines about how the program can be run, but the Department of Health and Human Services can approve what are called “Section 1115” waivers if a state has a custom-designed plan that would promote health and coverage beyond what traditional Medicaid does. The Trump administration is trying to flip this on its head, encouraging states to apply for waivers that will lead to fewer people being covered.

Boasberg’s ruling holds that states cannot use Section 1115 waivers in this manner. “That provision of the Act does not turn the comprehensive Medicaid program into a buffet for states,” he wrote.

Medicaid work requirements are a particular passion of Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services. She has claimed that denying low-income people health coverage is actually good for them, insisting that “it is not compassionate to trap people on government programs or create greater dependency on public assistance.” She has also claimed that work requirements do further the mission of Medicaid, pointing to studies that show people with jobs tend to be healthier (when in reality the correlation is probably the other way around.)

Arkansas and Kentucky were early adopters of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, which made the program available to people up to 138 percent of the poverty line. The Affordable Care Act originally required states to expand Medicaid, but a Supreme Court ruling allowed states to decide whether they wanted to or not. Republicans in these states are now intent on chipping away at this progress, and work requirements are one way the Trump administration is encouraging them to do it.

For now, that effort has hit a roadblock.

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beat 2018 --> dirty tricks: (anti-democratic authoritarian moves)

eg https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2019/03/04/right-wing-funded-groups-battle-new-state-governors

ctr-attack

If the corporate-funded influence groups on the Right have their way, there will be no honeymoon for newly elected Democratic governors.

Affiliates of the State Policy Network (SPN), a network of right-wing “think tanks” in 49 states bankrolled by the Kochs and other billionaires and big corporations, have already been deployed to oppose legislation introduced by Democratic governors in states that previously had GOP governors.

Last week the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) wrote about the battle over Medicaid in Wisconsin, where the newly elected Democratic governor, Tony Evers, who replaced the GOP’s Scott Walker, has introduced a measure to expand Medicaid in the state.

The article showed how right-wing “think tanks,” in this case the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) and the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy (CROWE), and state legislators quickly rolled out a flawed study to exaggerate the costs of Medicaid expansion to the tune of $600 million. The “research” was released without noting that the paper supported the anti-Medicaid expansion position taken by the groups’ major funders: the Bradley Foundation and the Koch brothers.

Minimum Wage Fight in Illinois

In Illinois, Governor J.B. Pritzker, who defeated Republican incumbent Bruce Rauner, introduced an increase in the state’s minimum wage as one of his first acts. The state’s SPN affiliate, the Illinois Policy Institute (IPI), quickly went on the attack, repeating claims that a rise in the minimum wage reduces jobs,because Illinois would have higher minimum wages than surrounding states. The group does not consider the relative cost of living among Midwestern states, and ignores the experience of nearby Minnesota where 92,600 have directly benefited from the January 1 increase, the Economic Policy Institute reports.

Nonetheless, the Illinois legislature voted along party lines to increase the state minimum wage to $15 by 2025, starting with a $1 increase next year to $9.25 an hour. On February 19, the Governor signed the bill into law.

IPI is well-connected to right-wing billionaires. The GOP megadonor Richard Uihlein has provided $11.8 million through his foundation to IPI since 2009, according to a CMD analysis of IRS filings. Robert Mercer has donated $1.1 million through his foundation to IPI over the same period, and the preferred piggy bank of the Koch donor network, DonorsTrust and its sister organization Donors Capital fund, has funneled over $1.5 million to IPI since 2010.

Notably, IPI has received $717,300 from SPN itself between 2012 and 2017, making it one of the largest grant recipients over this period.

Previously IPI was listed as a “partner organization” in the Charles Koch Institute‘s Liberty@Work program, but the current status of that program is unknown.

Consistent with the opinions of its funders, IPI also does not consider the ripple effect of a rise in the incomes of low wage workers.

A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute finds that raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2024 would increase wages for 40 million U.S. workers, which would “stimulate the economy and spur greater business activity and job growth.”

Renewable Energy in New Mexico

In New Mexico, newly elected Democratic Governor Lujan Grisham has made increasing the state’s reliance on renewable energy a hallmark of her first year. “We know that we cannot rely on the federal government right now to lead on climate action,” Lujan Grisham said in her January 15 State of the State address. “It is our responsibility and indeed our moral obligation to ensure our planet and our state are preserved for our children and their children.”

The SPN local affiliate, the Rio Grande Foundation (RGF), came right out to oppose the increase in renewable energy the state relies on, from 20 percent to 50 percent by 2030, and then to 80 percent by 2040, saying it will raise electrical bills.

RGF has received over half a million dollars from DonorsTrust since 2010 and tens of thousands from the Charles Koch Foundation since 2015. In addition, RGF has held joint events with the Charles Koch Institute.

RGF fails to consider the cost of carbon on health and its effects on climate change in its analysis. The industry-backed group also leaves out the fact that renewable energy prices in New Mexico have gone down by 60 percent to 70 percent, according to the newly appointed state energy agency head, Cottrell Propst, and that as new technologies are adopted the costs will come down even more. “We know that this technology and cost will not stay the same for renewables or energy storage,” Propst said. “History shows us it’s good to be ambitious, it’s good to be bold.”

RGF does not share that ambition and is even out of step with the state’s major utilities which, while not now embracing the same targets as the Governor, support increases in the state renewable energy standard to reduce carbon emissions.

Medicaid Work Rules in Michigan

The SPN affiliate in Michigan, Mackinac Center for Public Policy, is already battling newly elected Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s reconsideration of a 2018 law that included a work rule requirement for Medicaid recipients. Mackinac lobbied for the work requirement and testified in support of its passage.

Whitmer wants a reconsideration of the requirement in light of new research showing that people are losing coverage in Arkansas, one of the first states with the work requirement. Thousands of people in the state have lost coverage because of failing to report their activities, whether they are meeting rules or not, and almost 17,000 Medicaid recipients in all lost coverage in 2018.

In December alone, 4,655 Medicaid recipients lost coverage, many for failing to report their activities to the state. “Arkansas takes an especially aggressive approach to terminating coverage due to paperwork and compliance issues, such as not responding to a (state) request for information quickly enough,” the Arkansas Times reported.

The Mackinac Center ignores the negative societal effects a work requirement has and instead focuses on cutting Medicaid costs. “Medicaid has ballooned into an unwieldy and massively expensive entitlement program that crowds out access to services and vital resources for that most vulnerable population,” Mackinac reports.

But it provides no such evidence for its claims. Whitmer believes the Arkansas research may show that vulnerable people are losing coverage and that, until it is known who is losing coverage and why, Michigan should go slow on adopting the work rules.

Mackinac Center has received over $1.5 million from the Bradley Foundation since 1993 and $590,000 from the Koch family foundations since 2001, as well as over $3.4 million from the DonorsTrust conduits since 2010.

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AN 12/18

Don’t let the Trump administration corporatize Medicare

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https://www.alternet.org/economy/trumps-budget-director-reveals-plans-attack-social-security-and-medicare

Opponents of Social Security and Medicare are so eager to end these two overwhelmingly important and popular earned benefits that they can’t contain themselves. Mick Mulvaney, the Trump administration’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, is the latest to make crystal clear the longstanding plan to destroy both programs.

Speaking at a conference of state legislators hosted by the anti-government American Legislative Exchange Council (“ALEC”), Mulvaney just revealed that he plans first to go after what he sees as more politically achievable cuts. He explained that the next step, presumably after Trump is in his second term, will be for the administration not just to cut these programs but to end them as we know them.

Mulvaney is apparently so eager to go after our earned benefits that he threw the point into a speech to state legislators, even though both Social Security and Medicare are federal programs.

Mulvaney’s apparent uncontained enthusiasm to take away people’s earned benefits is similar to that of Mitch McConnell, who just weeks before the midterm, called for Social Security and Medicare to be “adjusted” (code for destroying them). McConnell couldn’t resist broadcasting his intentions, even though these programs are extremely popular even with Republican voters.

Why are these opponents so hostile to such important programs? Social Security, now more than eight decades old, and Medicare, now more than five decades old, have stood the test of time. Both of these efficient, virtually universal, overwhelmingly popular programs insure us against risks that all of us face. Rich or poor, anyone can suffer a disabling illness or accident, making work impossible. Rich or poor, any parent can die prematurely leaving dependent children. Rich or poor, all of us hope to live to old age and, if we are so fortunate, require income we cannot outlive and health insurance for the treatments and medication we inevitably will need.

The private sector is incapable of providing the wage and health insurance that Social Security and Medicare provide as efficiently, universally, securely or effectively as the federal government. Insurance works best when the greatest numbers of people are covered. The only entity that can require that everyone is covered and pays premiums as soon as they start working is the federal government. That is one of the reasons both Social Security and Medicare work so well.

And that is why Mulvaney, McConnell, and other opponents of these programs want to end them. These programs put the lie to their ideological zealotry, which insists that the private sector is always better than government.

Decades ago, opponents of these programs were forthright that their objections were ideological. They did not see the creation and administration of universal insurance programs as an appropriate role for the federal government. But the American people overwhelmingly disagreed, so this argument was utterly unsuccessful.

Now most opponents have changed their tactics, and proclaim their love for these programs. President George W. Bush, for example, proclaimed, “Social Security was a great moral success of the 20th century, and we must honor its great purposes in this new century.” His very next sentence argued for radically changing it.

Similarly, Mulvaney, McConnell, and other opponents hide their straightforward ideological opposition. Rather, these opponents subversively seek to undermine confidence in Social Security’s and Medicare’s future by asserting that both programs are unaffordable.

Worse, in their efforts to end Social Security and Medicare, they seek to turn Americans against each other. They tell us that seniors are taking from children, that people with disabilities are taking from seniors.

Moreover, in their efforts to lull us into thinking they are not seeking to hurt our legitimate interests, opponents claim that our vital and earned financial protection in the event of disability isn’t as “core” as our financial protection in the event of old age. In his recent ALEC speech, Mulvaney tried to make just such a claim, asserting, “You can reform and save a ton of money in Medicare and Social Security and not touch the primary pillars for the next several years.” Along those same lines, last April, Mulvaney rhetorically asked, “Do you really think that Social Security disability insurance is part of what people think of when they think of Social Security?”

I am confident that the over 10 million Americans receiving Social Security because of wages lost as the result of serious, work-ending disabilities understand that Social Security disability insurance is Social Security. When American workers pay into Social Security with every paycheck, disability insurance is one of the protections they earn, along with life insurance and retirement annuities.

Social Security disability benefits are inextricably intertwined with Social Security’s retirement and survivor benefits. Social Security benefits are generated from the same formula. When workers with disabilities reach retirement age, their benefit is unchanged in amount but is paid as a retirement benefit, no longer as a disability benefit. Despite those facts, though, Mulvaney’s claim that Social Security disability insurance is not really Social Security is a convenient rhetorical game to claim “core” benefits are not being touched.

For Medicare, Mulvaney revealed another trick before his ALEC audience. He floated the idea of Medicare no longer reimbursing teaching hospitals its fair share of those hospitals’ costs, arguing that the cut wouldn’t hurt beneficiaries. Like his claim that Social Security disability insurance is not “really’ Social Security, beneficiaries would be hurt, though not immediately, and the cause of the hurt would be difficult to trace.

While benefits wouldn’t be directly cut, it certainly would limit the ability of Medicare beneficiaries to get treatment at teaching hospitals if that were their choice and the best setting for their care. To the extent Medicare didn’t pay its fair share and teaching hospitals nevertheless continued to treat seniors and people with disabilities, those costs would be shifted to everyone else.

And, of course, this is just the start, Mulvaney made clear. “In the long term you’ll have to [make more major changes.] The president has asked me to fix the easy stuff first,” Mulvaney explained to his audience.

Fortunately, the Democrats—who support expanding, not cutting, Social Security and Medicare—have control of the House of Representatives, at least for now. But, all of us who want to keep the benefits we have earned must remain vigilant. We must not be fooled or confused into allowing opponents to make what they deem “easy” cuts to our earned benefits.

These opponents will not give up. And neither must we. Expanding, not cutting, our Social Security and Medicare is profoundly wise policy and is overwhelmingly popular. But it will only become a reality if we keep our voices loud, reminding our political leaders that it’s voters, not donors, to whom they must account next election day.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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==

AN

"Easy to pay for something that costs less': New study shows 'Medicare for All' would save US $5.1 trillion over 10 years

By Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

"Medicare for All promises a system that

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[cf hedges we need to give ppl security/net or they will keep going for fake populism/magical thinking; is this reverse/leverage?]

ballot measures in Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah to expand Medicaid didn't just draw out a lot of voters; it might have created some, and not just for the midterm election. Evidence from the last four years of the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion suggests that people who get Medicaid turn into voters.

An author of one of the studies, Jake Haselswerdt, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri, says, "We can confidently say: When you expand Medicaid eligibility, participation goes up." The theories include the fact that Medicaid has been shown to increase financial stability as well as mental health treatment, and has meant particular improvement for people suffering from depression. Maybe they have more capacity, both in time and in their personal well-being, to participate. It's also possible that enrolling hooked them into the mechanisms of getting registered to vote and then voting.

Maybe it's the greater investment they have in their government by having it work for them. "These are programs that have a major effect on people's lives," said Andrea Campbell, a professor of political science at M.I.T. who is an expert on the politics of Social Security. Seeing government work and having it work for you can raise the stakes and spur greater involvement.

Whatever the reason, a handful of studies have used the example of Medicaid expansion, comparing adjacent counties in states that accepted the expansion with counties in states that did not. Expansion counties have a 3-4 percentage point increase in registrations AND voting. What isn't clear at this point is how durable that increase is, since we only have four years’ worth of data to work with.

But with health care front and center in the political debate this cycle, and almost certainly in the next as well, chances are pretty good the trend is going to stick around a little longer.

https://www.alternet.org/medicaid-expansion-doesnt-just-make-people-healthier-it-makes-democracy-healthier-too

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koch loss

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2018/11/16/koch-machine-suffers-major-losses-its-health-care-agenda/

For the past decade, the Koch brothers and their network of political and policy groups have made fighting government health benefits and reforms the centerpiece of their electoral agenda. But the 2018 midterm election results show that the tide of public opinion has turned against them.

Despite the best efforts of the Koch’s astroturf group, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), Medicaid expansion ballot measures passed in Utah, Idaho, and Nebraska, providing coverage to an additional 325,000 low-income people. Republican governors who have been blocking Medicaid expansion were defeated in at least three states, and dozens of new Democratic candidates won seats in Congress by promising to protect the Affordable Care Act.

Together with a poor showing by one of the Kochs’ super PACs, AFP Action, the loss of these three state ballot initiatives to expand Medicaid suggests that AFP is seriously out of step with voters.

All three states had ballot initiatives that passed and were opposed by AFP. A measure proposing a cigarette tax to fund Medicaid expansion lost in Montana, which passed expansion legislation in 2016.

Thirty-four states had already approved expansion, and the passage of the initiatives raises the number to 37. Before this election, Maine had been the only state to pass a Medicaid expansion ballot measure.

Status of state Medicaid expansion decisions, Kaiser Family Foundation, 2018

In Maine, Governor Paul LePage (R) vetoed legislation to expand Medicaid five times, but voters took the matter to the ballot in 2017 and won by a margin of nearly 2 to 1. Maine’s newly elected governor, Janet Mills (D), has vowed to implement expansion.

AFP had worked hard to oppose Medicaid expansion in Maine, where expansion means coverage for an additional 70,000 or 80,000 people, and its chapters in Utah, Nebraska, and Idaho conducted new opposition campaigns this year involving radio, digital media and mailings.

In Nebraska, Medicaid expansion will cover 86,000 additional people, while in Utah 170,000 people will gain coverage, along with 69,000 more in Idaho.

The Koch-backed State Policy Network (SPN) — a right-wing web of “think tanks” across the country — also provided support to AFP in these states by publishing numerous studies opposing Medicaid expansion.

The Maine Heritage Policy Center published a lengthy report titled, “Reject Medicaid Expansion,” which claimed that expansion is too costly for Maine and would not result in lives saved.

The Idaho Freedom Foundation published a piece on its website arguing that Medicaid expansion would be expensive and an insult to first settlers who never lamented “their lack of health insurance, healthcare, or insisting that the government provide it, or any other services, to them.”

Utah’s Sutherland Institute wrote on its website that expanding Medicaid would raise the sales tax and result in lower quality healthcare, and Nebraska’s Platte Institute for Economic Research argued that Medicaid expansion would result in cuts to K12 funding and higher property taxes.

Public Opinion Shifting

It is clear from the election results that public opinion has shifted against the Kochs’ “free market” approach to health care and steadfast opposition to government health regulations and benefits.

Pre-election polls showed that health care was the most important issue to voters in battleground states, and 55 percent of voters in non-expansion states said they wanted Medicaid expansion.

Not only did voters approve health care access ballot measures, they voted for governors who made expanding Medicaid coverage part of their platform.

In Wisconsin, Democrat Tony Evers defeated incumbent Republican Governor Scott Walker. Evers assured voters that he would accept federal dollars for expanding Medicaid and would protect those with pre-existing conditions.

In Kansas, Democrat Governor-elect Laura Kelly promised on the campaign trail to advocate for and sign a bill approving Medicaid expansion in her first year.

And in Maine, Democrats seized control from the Republicans in the governor’s mansion and the Senate after years of Governor LePage’s obstruction of reform.

In Florida and Georgia, where gubernatorial elections are still undecided, Democrats Stacey Abrams (GA) and Andrew Gillum (FL) made Medicaid expansion a major campaign issue.

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Because the economy is doing well? This shameless president is quick to take credit for what is, according to Forbes magazine, “just a continuation from Obama’s presidency.” Job growth has been steady for the last eight years.

And try selling that booming economy to those who are working two and three and four jobs to scratch out a living, the 41 million Americans in poverty, a third of them kids—or to the more than half a million homeless. As Philip Alston, U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty, said in June, “In a rich country like the United States, the persistence of extreme poverty is a political choice made by those in power.”

Why would you vote to keep Trump unchecked? Because he and Republican candidates suddenly are promising that they’d never, cross their hearts, ever disallow people with pre-existing conditions from decent health care? That’s a lie; they’ve spent eight years trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act some seventy times and the Justice Department backs a Texas lawsuit that would overturn Obamacare’s protection of insurance for those with pre-existing conditions.

And lest we forget, should they hold onto their majorities in the House and Senate, the GOP leadership is openly talking about gutting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, the programs you’ve paid for throughout your working life. These reductions are to compensate for the trillion-dollar deficit they themselves created with their billions in beloved tax cuts for the rich. There’s even talk about cutting or eliminating the Federal minimum wage....

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https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/donald-trump-and-republicans-work-every-day-destroy-social-security-medicare-and-medicaid

during..Trump’s campaign for president, he promised over and over again to protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Now, in the lead-up to the midterm elections, Trump is claiming to have kept that promise. Completely in character for a president who doesn’t let a day go by without lying, he recently falsely claimed, “We’re saving Social Security, the Democrats will destroy Social Security. We’re saving Medicare. The Dems, you look at what they’re doing. They want to destroy Medicare.”

It’s time to set the record straight. Far from keeping his word, Trump and his administration have spent every day since taking power working to destroy Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Here are 10 of the Trump administration’s worst attacks on the American people’s Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid:

  1. Trump nominated Congressman Mick Mulvaney to be the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director. Mulvaney has a long history of working to destroy Social Security and Medicare. In 2011, he said, “We have to end Medicare as we know it.”

Every single Republican senator voted to confirm Mulvaney, while every Democrat voted against.

  1. Trump nominated Tom Price to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Medicare. Price has stated that “We will not rest until we make certain that government-run health care [e.g., Medicare] is ended” and decried “the federal government’s intrusion into medicine through Medicare.”

Every single Republican senator voted to confirm Price, while every Democrat present voted against. After less than a year on the job, Price was forced to resign in disgrace, and Trump replaced him with Alex Azar, a former pharmaceutical executive who tripled the price of insulin.

  1. As soon as Trump took office, the Republican Party’s top priority was to take health care away from tens of millions of Americans. If “Trumpcare” had become law, it would have cut $880 billion from Medicaid, creating a disaster for seniors who rely on Medicaid for long-term care. It would also have created a Medicare time bomb by starving the program of essential funding.
  1. Trump’s 2018 budget proposal sought cuts of $800 billion to Medicaid and Social Security Disability Insurance over 10 years. When OMB Director Mulvaney was asked if these cuts would lead to fewer people receiving their earned Social Security disability benefits, he replied, “I hope so.”
  1. Republicans passed a massive tax giveaway to billionaires and corporations, which they are now using as an excuse to demand cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
  1. Nearly every House Republican voted for a so-called “Balanced Budget Amendment,” which would make it unconstitutional for Social Security to use its own $2.9 trillion trust fund to pay promised benefits. (Fortunately, the Amendment did not attain the two-thirds majority required for passage.)
  1. The Trump administration floated a proposal to eliminate the payroll tax, which would have served as a Trojan horse to undermine Social Security.
  1. Trump issued an executive order opening the door to the politicization of Administrative Law Judges, who are supposed to impartially resolve disputes between Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries and the people in government who run those programs.
  1. The Trump administration announced plans to get rid of a rule that allowed nursing home residents and their families, in facilities that accept Medicare or Medicaid funding, the right to take those facilities to court for alleged neglect, abuse or sexual assault.
  1. The Trump administration began allowing states to impose work requirements on Medicaid beneficiaries.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

==

https://www.alternet.org/economy/pete-petersons-ghost

Peter G. “Pete” Peterson, the billionaire businessman and anti-government crusader, died last week at the age of 91. He leaves behind family and friends who will miss him, and a vast coterie of consultants and politicians who may miss his checks even more. They can take comfort from the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley: “He doth not sleep/he hath awakened from the dream of life …”

Peterson will be mourned by those who loved him. But that’s no reason to forget the harm he has done, especially since his family vows to continue his work. His son, speaking on behalf of the foundation Peterson created, says that “we will carry on his legacy with passion and pride.”

That legacy is marked by Pete Peterson’s long war against Social Security and Medicare, his austerity economics, and the false aura of objectivity Peterson used to promote his ideology.

Behind his carefully stage-managed veneer of bipartisanship (his team once tried to get me suspended from a publication for calling him right-wing), Peterson engaged in a decades-long war on the social contract. Programs like Social Security and Medicare were his immediate targets, but his ultimate goal was even broader: He wanted to extinguish the ideal of public goods, and put an end to the notion that certain social programs should be universal.

Peterson took conservative ideas and gave them an undeserved air of truth and neutrality. Politicians who embraced them were more likely to receive a steady flow of high-dollar contributions and gaining entrée to the right salons and alliances.

Thanks to Peterson, prominent journalists can make outlandish and inaccurate statements about “entitlement” programs, while still laying claim to journalistic objectivity. That’s no mean feat on Peterson’s part – although it becomes easier when you can spend nearly half a billion dollars in four years to promote your agenda, as Peterson did. (Peterson engaged in his crusade for decades; his total spending isn’t known.)

Peterson may be gone, but his ideology still holds sway in the corridors of political and media power.

Doing the Math

“The standard operating procedures of private equity—purchasing businesses, adding debt, minimizing taxes, cutting costs (and facilities and employment), extracting large fees—are just the sort of things to aggravate popular anger about finance.”Peterson was a corporate success at a young age, and then joined Richard Nixon’s Cabinet. But he became a billionaire as co-founder of the Blackstone Group, one of four firms that exemplify what The Economist calls “the barbarian establishment.”  As that (hardly left-wing) publication writes:

Peterson promptly put his billions to work on a new mission: Cutting government programs, especially Medicare and Social Security, and reducing government deficits. (The fact that these moves would reduce the political incentive to tax billionaires is never mentioned in Peterson’s work.)

Peterson’s sleight-of-hand trick, and it was a brilliant one, was to present his opinions as neutral and objective truth. As the New York Times reported in 2011:

“If some consider him Cassandra and others Chicken Little, Mr. Peterson considers himself, in self-deprecating (and self-interested) terms, as a data-driven businessman who ‘simply did the math.’”

The Peterson team claims that its proposals would exclude the poor, but cuts are a slippery slope. Social Security benefits are already meager, and any reductions – including cuts to cost-of-living increases and increases in the eligibility age – will lead to added poverty. Here’s some real math: Medicare saves lives, and “greater spending per beneficiary is associated with significantly lower mortality rates.”  So does Medicaid. Social Security lifts 22 million Americans out of poverty, including children and non-elderly adults.

And poverty kills.

Sleight of Hand

Deficits were Peterson’s obsession. But when it came to economics, Peterson did the arithmetic, not “the math.” His zero-sum approach to government budgets failed to recognize the wide range of policy choices that are open to governments or the ways that government spending can create economic growth.

In a 2010 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Peterson argued that “spending cuts must play a lead role in any solution to our long-term structural deficits.” That’s an ideological statement that can’t be found anywhere in “the math.” For revenue, Peterson’s go-to solution was a consumption tax that would disproportionately harm the middle class.

No cut is too cruel for the Peterson crowd. A Peterson-backed group praised the draconian spending cuts in Donald Trump’s budget proposal last year, writing, “The President deserves credit for setting a fiscal goal and working to meet it.”

But it chastised the Republican for failing to apply an equally heavy hand to Social Security and Medicare.

Testing Mean

The policy heart of the Peterson agenda is means testing: of Social Security, Medicare, and other vital government programs. The Concord Coalition, which Peterson co-founded, pioneered the idea of means-testing Social Security benefits and reducing them for anyone making $40,000 per year or more.  The idea quickly spread to Medicare and other universal programs.

It sounds reasonable, at first. Why should rich people collect taxpayer-funded benefits? One answer – because it’s an insurance program – can be hard to convey, but is nevertheless important.

Voters forget that means-testing is a slippery slope. Once it’s applied to vital programs, it can be ratcheted down until most Americans are excluded from them. Should we means-test public high schools? Elementary schools?

Means-testing works for anti-poverty programs. But under social insurance programs like Social Security, everybody contributes and everyone is eligible for benefits (with limited exceptions).

For 50 years, both political parties favored these kinds of universal programs. Peterson changed that.

When people are debating means-testing, they’re not asking a more obvious question: If we’re so concerned about giving “free rides” to rich people, why don’t we just raise their taxes?

Supporting Cast

Peterson assembled an ensemble cast of characters to push his message. Ex-senator Alan Simpson became a key spokesman, primarily because he shared Peterson’s gift for making a heavily ideological agenda sound like blunt truth-telling. Erskine Bowles, David Walker, and a coterie of economic and policy consultants also filled the ranks.

Peterson recruited media figures, too, through his “Fiscal Summits” and other events. Prominent journalists were offered hosting and guest appearances at Peterson events (and were presumably paid for them) At least one received a board seat on a Peterson organization, while at the same time “objectively” covering Peterson-style initiatives. (I reported on Lesley Stahl’s conflict of interest in 2013.) Journalists were also given talking points to help them sound knowledgeable about fiscal policy.

Politicians of both parties embraced the Peterson agenda for years. Bill Clinton, who received Peterson funding on the road to the White House. turned the Democratic Party in a more Peterson-friendly fiscal direction. Clinton emphasized deficit reduction, privatization, and means-testing as president, while over-praising the skills of the private sector.

Reaching the Summit

...

==

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/us-no-country-older-men-and-women

https://www.alternet.org/deeply-immoral-values-todays-republican-leaders

tax voodoo

==

OMG

http://exiledonline.com/monster-koch-bust-charles-koch-used-social-security-to-lure-friedrich-von-hayek-to-america/

MONSTER KOCH BUST: CHARLES KOCH USED SOCIAL SECURITY TO LURE FRIEDRICH VON HAYEK TO AMERICA

By Yasha Levine and Mark Ames

“Ha-ha! Those suckers will believe anything! “

This article appeared in the October 17, 2011 edition of The Nation

There’s right-wing hypocrisy, and then there’s this: Charles Koch, billionaire patron of free-market libertarianism, privately championed the benefits of Social Security to Friedrich Hayek, the leading laissez-faire economist of the twentieth century. Koch even sent Hayek a government pamphlet to help him take advantage of America’s federal retirement insurance and healthcare programs.

This extraordinary correspondence regarding Social Security began in early June 1973, weeks after Koch was appointed president of the Institute for Humane Studies.Along with his brothers, Koch inherited his father’s privately held oil company in 1967, becoming one of the richest men in America. He used this fortune to help turn theIHS, then based in Menlo Park, California, into one of the world’s foremost libertarian think tanks. Soon after taking over as president, Koch invited Hayek to serve as the institute’s “distinguished senior scholar” in preparation for its first conference on Austrian economics, to be held in June 1974.

Hayek initially declined Koch’s offer. In a letter to IHS secretary Kenneth Templeton Jr., dated June 16, 1973, Hayek explains that he underwent gall bladder surgery in Austria earlier that year, which only heightened his fear of “the problems (and costs) of falling ill away from home.” (Thanks to waves of progressive reforms, postwar Austria had near universal healthcare and robust social insurance plans that Hayek would have been eligible for.)

IHS vice president George Pearson (who later became a top Koch Industries executive) responded three weeks later, conceding that it was all but impossible to arrange affordable private medical insurance for Hayek in the United States. However, thanks to research by Yale Brozen, a libertarian economist at the University of Chicago, Pearson happily reported that “social security was passed at the University of Chicago while you [Hayek] were there in 1951. You had an option of being in the program. If you so elected at that time, you may be entitled to coverage now.”

A few weeks later, the institute reported the good news: Professor Hayek had indeed opted into Social Security while he was teaching at Chicago and had paid into the program for ten years. He was eligible for benefits.

On August 10, 1973, Koch wrote a letter appealing to Hayek to accept a shorter stay at the IHS, hard-selling Hayek on Social Security’s retirement benefits, which Koch encouraged Hayek to draw on even outside America. He also assured Hayek that Medicare, which had been created in 1965 by the Social Security amendments as part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, would cover his medical needs.

Koch writes: “You may be interested in the information that we uncovered on the insurance and other benefits that would be available to you in this country. Since you have paid into the United States Social Security Program for a full forty quarters, you are entitled to Social Security payments while living anywhere in the Free World. Also, at any time you are in the United States, you are automatically entitled to hospital coverage.”

Then, taking on the unlikely role of Social Security Administration customer service rep, Koch adds, “In order to be eligible for medical coverage you must apply during the registration period which is anytime from January 1 to March 31. For your further information, I am enclosing a pamphlet on Social Security.”

* * *

The private correspondence between two of the most important figures shaping the Republican Party’s economic policies—billionaire libertarian Charles Koch and Nobel Prize–winning economist Friedrich Hayek, godfather of today’s free-market movement—were obtained by Yasha Levine from the Hayek archives at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This is the first time the content of these letters has been reported on.

The documents offer a rare glimpse into how these two major free-market apostles privately felt about government assistance programs—revealing a shocking degree of cynicism and an unimaginable betrayal of the ideas they sold to the American public and the rest of the world.

Charles Koch and his brother, David, have waged a three-decade campaign to dismantle the American social safety net. At the center of their most recent push is the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, which has co-sponsored Tea Party events, spearheaded the war against healthcare reform and supported Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s attack on public sector unions. FreedomWorks, another conservative group central to the rise of the Tea Party and the right-wing attempt to dismantle Social Security and Medicare, emerged from an advocacy outfit founded by the Koch brothers called Citizens for a Sound Economy. FreedomWorks now exists as a separate entity that champions the “Austrian school” of economics.

Hayek, a founder of that school of thought, is primarily known for two major works. The first, The Road to Serfdom (1944), grudgingly accepts the possibility that some “free” countries might find it necessary to set up a bare-minimum catastrophic social insurance program limited to the very neediest, so long as the benefits do not incentivize productive members of society to abandon free-market retirement savings or medical insurance.

Hayek’s comparatively liberal attitude toward social insurance hardened considerably by the time he published his 1960 opus, The Constitution of Liberty. Despite privately spending the intervening years paying into Social Security, Hayek devoted an entire chapter—titled “Social Security”—to denouncing the modern welfare state as a gateway to tyranny and moral decay. Ironically, one of Hayek’s main objections to government programs like Social Security was the “fundamental absurdity” of using tax dollars to promote their benefits. In other words, Hayek publicly objected to the kind of brochure that Charles Koch sent him. In their private correspondence, however, we could find no objection to this “fundamental absurdity.”

By the mid-1970s, Hayek had fully distanced himself from the modest benefits he’d originally conceded to in The Road to Serfdom. In his preface to the 1976 edition, he explained his “error”: “I had not wholly freed myself from all the current interventionist superstitions, and in consequence still made various concessions which I now think unwarranted.”

Publicly, in academia and in politics, in the media and in propaganda, these two major figures—one the sponsor, the other the mandarin—have been pushing Americans to do away with Social Security and Medicare for our own good: we will become freer, richer, healthier and better people.

But the exchange between Koch and Hayek exposes the bad-faith nature of their public arguments. In private, Koch expresses confidence in Social Security’s ability to care for a clearly worried Hayek. He and his fellow IHS libertarians repeatedly assure Hayek that his government-funded coverage in the United States would be adequate for his medical needs.None of them—not Koch, Hayek or the other libertarians at the IHS—express anything remotely resembling shame or unease at such a betrayal of their public ideals and writings. Nowhere do they worry that by opting into and taking advantage of Social Security programs they might be hastening a socialist takeover of America. It’s simply a given that Social Security and Medicare work, and therefore should be used.

* * *

Shortly after this exchange, in 1974, Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics. The next year he went on something of a victory tour of the United States, which ended at the IHS, where he spent the summer as a resident scholar. Hayek returned to Menlo Park again in the summer of 1977. The Nation has filed a Freedom of Information Request with the Social Security Administration to discover if, in fact, Hayek received Social Security payments or used Medicare during his residencies at the institute or at any other time. At press time, these requests have not been answered.

Meanwhile, in 1974, Charles Koch founded the Cato Institute (called the Charles Koch Foundation until 1977). This think tank has done more than any other to push for an end to Social Security. In 1983 the Cato Journal published a blueprint of how to destroy Social Security, “Achieving a ‘Leninist Strategy,’” by Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis. The authors acknowledged that a strong coalition of Americans backed Social Security and thus saw the need for “guerrilla warfare against both the current Social Security system and the coalition that supports it.” Victory could be far in the future, “but then, as Lenin well knew, to be a successful revolutionary, one must also be patient and consistently plan for real reform,” they write.

As part of Cato’s campaign, the institute has launched various groups and projects, including the Project on Social Security Choice, whose co-chair is José Piñera, architect of Augusto Pinochet’s controversial pension privatization scheme in Chile. Cato Institute members and alumni also dominated President George W. Bush’s commissionon Social Security in his first term and spearheaded Bush’s failed attempt to privatize the program in the early months of his second term.

Thanks in part to Hayek’s writings and to the Koch brothers’ decades-long war on the social safety net, Americans are among the Western world’s few citizens without universal healthcare. Not surprisingly, life expectancy here has fallen to forty-ninth place in the world, while medical costs are double those of other Western nations. By contrast, Hayek’s native Austria, which has a public health plan that covers 99 percent of the population, boasts a healthcare system ranked ninth in the world by the World Health Organization.

* * *

When Texas Governor Rick Perry, a front-runner in the Republican primary for president, derides Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” or a “monstrous lie,” that rhetoric can be traced back to the work of Hayek and Koch. And yet we now know that in private practice, Hayek was perfectly content to pay into Social Security and that Koch encouraged him to draw upon both Social Security and Medicare. Did they really believe what they wrote? Or were these attacks just scare-talk meant for the rubes, for you and us, “the public”?

Calling this mere hypocrisy downplays the seriousness of their fraud. Koch and Hayek are no more hypocritical than the used-car salesman who knowingly sells a lemon to a gullible buyer, or the financial agency that rates “AAA” instruments it knows are crap. This is a grand swindle played on a trusting, gullible public, a scam whose goal is to con America’s dying middle class into handing over their retirement money to the richest 0.1 percent, convincing them that in doing so, they’re “empowering” themselves and protecting their “individual liberty.”

Another question hangs over all this: Why didn’t Charles Koch offer to put up some of his enormous wealth to pay for Hayek’s temporary medical insurance? One obvious answer: because the state had already offered a better and freer program. But perhaps Koch’s stinginess also reveals the social ethic behind libertarian values: every man for himself; selfishness is a virtue.

---

http://www.alternet.org/story/149721/ayn_rand_railed_against_government_benefits%2C_but_grabbed_social_security_and_medicare_when_she_needed_them/

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America's very rich keep trying to start a movement among college students to blame senior citizens for the sorry state of the economy that kids will inherit. Specifically, the billionaires keep trying to scapegoat Social Security.

This is part of the public relations effort to create a "grand bargain" to cut America's (fast-declining) budget deficit. The Peter G. Peterson Foundation has spent about a billion dollars of Peterson's own money to create faux movements to get students to take up this unlikely cause.

The latest of the billionaires to try this gambit is Stanley Druckenmiller, net worth estimated at $2.9 billion, former head of the hedge fund Duquesne Capital. Druckenmiller's personal campus crusade has been the subject of two fawning profiles, one by Tom Friedman in Wednesday's Times, the other by James Freeman in Saturday's Wall Street Journal.

Druckenmiller's campus crusade is based on such preposterous economics that I hereby challenge him to a college debate or series of debates. Freeman's puff piece in the Journal begins thus:

Stan Druckenmiller makes an unlikely class warrior. He's a member of the 1% -- make that the 0.001% -- one of the most successful money managers of all time, and 60 years old to boot. But lately he has been touring college campuses promoting a message of income redistribution you don't hear out of Washington. It's how federal entitlements like Medicare and Social Security are letting Mr. Druckenmiller's generation rip off all those doting Barack Obama voters in Generation X, Y and Z.

"I have been shocked at the reception. I had planned to only visit Bowdoin, " his alma mater in Maine, he says. But he has since been invited to multiple campuses, and even the kids at Stanford and Berkeley have welcomed his theme of generational theft.

The Tom Friedman column, titled, "Sorry, Kids. We Ate It All.," which I addressed in the American Prospect Thursday, Friedman wrote:

After we baby boomers get done retiring -- at a rate of 7,000 to 11,000 a day -- if current taxes and entitlement promises are not reformed, the cupboard will be largely bare for today's Facebook generation. But what are the chances of them getting out of Facebook and into their parents' faces -- and demanding not only that the wealthy do their part but that the next generation as a whole leaves something for this one? Too bad young people aren't paying attention. Or are they?

Wait! Who is that speaking to crowds of students at Berkeley, Stanford, Brown, U.S.C., Bowdoin, Notre Dame and N.Y.U. -- urging these "future seniors" to start a movement to protect their interests? That's Stan Druckenmiller, the legendary investor...

Where to start? If you itemize all the reasons why recent college graduates face a wretched economy, Social Security doesn't even make the list. What does make the list are unreliable jobs that pay lousy wages, the aftereffects of a financial bubble created on Wall Street, and unaffordable college that leaves graduates starting life with more than a trillion dollars worth of debt.

The next generation, and the one after that, will have a shot at a decent life if we can get growth and a fairer distribution of earnings back on track. That project has nothing whatever to do with Social Security or the federal deficit. On the contrary, if we keep on the austerity kick and further cut social outlays that promote opportunities, growth will be even slower.

The biggest lie in Druckenmiller's crusade is the premise that the income distribution problem is somehow generational and that he, as a billionaire, has anything whatever in common with most college students or most recipients of Social Security. One of his pitches to students is that Social Security is excessive because he, a very wealthy man, receives it but doesn't need it.

But for the vast majority of the elderly, Social Security is a lifeline, and a meager one at that. Some two-thirds of all seniors depend on Social Security for half of their income. Fully 46 percent of elderly widows and other unmarried seniors depend on Social Security for at least 90 percent of their income.

The entire projected 75-year shortfall in the Social Security trust funds that conservatives make such a big deal about is around one percent of GDP per year. We could make it up with modest tax increases on wealthy people like Druckenmiller.

Since Social Security is financed by payroll taxes -- on wage and salary income -- the real Social Security crisis is the crisis of stagnant wages. If average wages had continued to track average productivity growth during the past three decades, as they did in the three decades after World War II, Social Security would be in perpetual surplus.

The real crisis facing the elderly is not that Social Security is excessive but that it's inadequate -- especially with the collapse of traditional pensions in favor of far less reliable 401k plans (another counter-revolution made on Wall Street.)

There is a certain moral blindness and chutzpah of very wealthy people trying to enlist students in a generational movement against the alleged affluence of their grandparents. The real issue here is not generation, but class, specifically Druckenmiller's class.

Contrary to the claim in writer Freeman's opening sentence -- that Druckenmiller makes "an unlikely class warrior," his crusade is precisely class war, of the sort we have been seeing for decades -- of the very wealthy against everyone else.

Happily, most of America's students don't seem to be taking the bait. None of Pete Peterson's front groups has had much resonance on campus -- not his "Fiscal Wake-Up Tour," nor "Fix the Debt," nor more far-fetched groups aimed a college students such as "America's Promise Alliance," nor the foundation's poetry contest aimed at battling deficits in verse.

However, these crusades do have a certain resonance among media elites and even in the Obama White House. As we go into the next phase of a trumped up budget crisis, with Social Security and Medicare as targets A and B, the politics and economics could not be more perverse.

So how about it Mr. Druckenmiller? If you are so sure of the righteousness of your cause, how about defending yourself in a campus debate?

Robert Kuttner's new book is Debtors' Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility. He is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior Fellow at Demos.

==

==

Freshman Colorado Congressman Scott Tipton received an award recently for his work in support of senior citizens from a group called RetireSafe. Tipton was one of 20 Republicans elected to Congress from swing districts to have received the award, according to RollCall, but the award was fake, or at least the group that gave the award was fake. RetireSafe is an industry front group run by Republican and conservative politics figures and founded by Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America to push policies that will boost industry profits.

It’s the kind of revelation that has become commonplace in today’s political news, where industry and government figures exchange revolving seats, yet it still has the power to shock in its details.

“Local news reports and campaign advertisements trumpeted the awards…” RollCall writes, “providing these Republicans with valuable political cover for supporting controversial bills, such as the budget proposed by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) that would have dramatically revamped Medicare.”

RetireSafe bills itself as a nonpartisan senior citizens advocacy organization, but it is led by former Bush and Reagan administration officials, small-government activists and pharmaceutical industry lobbyists and consultants. It is funded at least in part by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the drug industry’s chief lobbying group, and at times has served as a third-party entity to validate the industry’s agenda….

The award, which sounds a lot like an endorsement that could come from one of dozens of other seniors groups, can then be used as a credential on the campaign trail.

Matt Inzeo, communications director for the Colorado Democratic Party, said the story demonstrated that Republicans like Tipton will have a very hard time this year selling their service-slashing pro-industry priorities to constituents.

“While Scott Tipton stakes his political future on fake awards from front groups, Colorado seniors know he pushed a raw deal on them by trying to turn Medicare into a voucher program,” Inzeo wrote in an email. “Tipton can’t paper over the fact that he would hike seniors’ health care costs by over $6,000 a year, and this charade shows that lame attempts to hide the facts will quickly backfire.”

Tipton has made news in the short months since he took office for accusations of corruption and dirty tricks.

He was investigated by and apologized to a House ethics committee for pushing communication services through his offices for Broadnet, a company where his daughter worked as a lobbyist and where his nephew worked as CEO. More recently he was accused of packing his town meetings with Republicans and mining industry interests by sending out announcements of scheduled meetings to select email lists.

The RetireSafe seniors award shell game seemed to have worked on at least a small scale for Tipton, garnering a brief spot in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. The award presentation ceremony drew members of the Alzheimer’s Association and the Colorado Gerontological Society.

The Sentinel piece:

Tipton’s bill wins kudos from group

A Washington, D-C.-based organization that described itself as a watchdog for personal freedom and advocate for seniors on Social Security and Medicare recognized U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton, R-Colo., for sponsoring legislation to repeal a part of the new health care law.

Al Cors Jr., RetireSafe.org vice president, gave Tipton a plaque recognizing him for sponsoring legislation to repeal the Independent Payment Advisory Board, which has the task of reducing the growth of Medicare and is required to implement its first proposals in 2015.

RetireSafe.org, which says it represents more than 400,000 seniors, lists health, financial, national and personal security as a pyramid of goals supporting personal freedom.

Representatives of the Alzheimer’s Association and Colorado Gerontological Society attended the presentation.

According the Democratic Party Congressional Committee, the Alliance for Retired Americans on Friday alerted its members that RetireSafe was not to be trusted; it’s a “front group for the pharmaceutical industry” the group wrote in an email. AARP has issued a similar statement. Tipton could not be reached for comment.

==

  1. The Koch brothers want to destroy the most popular government program of all, Social Security, by funding right-wing think tanks that spread misinformation about Social Security's long-term financial health, claiming it will not survive. They want people to invest their retirement savings on Wall Street, which is riskier and would earn billions in fees for investment firms. They want to raise the retirement age for Social Security to 70, which would especially penalize blue-collar workers who do manual labor, as their bodies wear out more quickly than white-collar workers.

http://www.alternet.org/print/election-2014/11-things-koch-brothers-dont-want-you-know-robert-greenwalds-newly-updated-documentary

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“Don’t retreat, instead reload!”

Much of the right-wing’s resurgence is due to its intense investment in technology and communications. Republicans, as well as right-wing conservatives, realized that their image could be salvaged if repackaged properly. And the most discussed post-2008 election concern was the advantage held by the Left in communication infrastructure. In a December 2008 reflection piece titled the “Roots of Defeat,” Republican consultant Patrick Ruffini wrote in the National Review that progressive news sites, like the Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo, were the constant purveyors of “attack memes” against the conservative movement and its candidates. Talking Points Memo had led the liberal blogosphere’s mobilization against President Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security in 2005. In addition to its rapid news coverage, the web site posted the phone numbers of Democratic politicians who had indicated support for Bush’s proposal and encouraged readers to call. The groundswell of opposition from bloggers, then the general public, marked the first significant policy defeat for President Bush. As Ruffini noted, the defeat punctured Bush’s “aura of invincibility and presage[d] the death spiral to come.” ThinkProgress, where I began working in 2009, had helped expose much of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s relationship with the Bush administration, and Talking Points Memo broke the story of the Bush Justice Department’s systematic political firings of U.S. Attorneys around the country. As the 2008 election unfolded, the McCain campaign’s positions and statements were instantly fact checked and scrutinized by leading progressive web sites. Ruffini observed that progressive blogs did actual research and reporting while most conservative bloggers were “generally commentators and not reporters.” He also noted that the Right lacked many of the technological innovations employed by Barack Obama’s campaign, and, more important, lacked a powerful online megaphone for its ideological goals.

As conservative writer Ross Douthat noted in a post-election interview about the future of conservatism, the Internet also served as a vital organizing platform for progressives. DailyKos, Douthat said, was one of the main sources of “left-wing populist anger against the excesses of the Bush Administration.” The DailyKos system allows the public, after registering, to post blog entries, which are either selected by moderators or voted up to the “Recommended” list by other users. Other organizations, from MoveOn to Democracy for America to the message board Democratic Underground, had helped feed the surge in leftist populism through the Internet by providing opportunities for like-minded people to find each other instantly.