Last year, the federal government spent $20.5 billion overpaying private insurers for Medicare Advantage plans — and the industry’s aggressive lobbying campaign is kneecapping efforts by lawmakers to stop the scheme.
For decades, union-busting bosses and Republican politicians have had a powerful ally in their war on organized labor: the United States Supreme Court.
Sanders Introduces Medicare for All with 14 Colleagues in the Senate
New York City’s Municipal Labor Committee voted March 9 to scrap some of the best retiree health care coverage in the country. The change would put 250,000 city retirees into a for-profit Medicare Advantage plan run by Aetna.
Our current system defines health as the ability to work. Those who can’t are abandoned and exploited. If you’re too sick to work, you will be forced into poverty twice over: First by the loss of wages, and second, if lucky, by SSDI, or poverty.
The Jeff Bezos-owned newspaper sprinkled its coverage of an intensifying fight over Medicare with ads purchased by an organization that promotes private Medicare Advantage plans.
The Medicare privatization program "presents a threat to the integrity of traditional Medicare, and an opportunity for corporations to take money from taxpayers while denying care to beneficiaries," said Physicians for a National Health Program.
As yet another scandal involving Medicare Advantage made headlines this week, progressive U.S. lawmakers and advocates renewed calls to abolish the private health insurance program.
"Adding dental, vision, and hearing benefits to Medicare is supported by 84% of the American people," said an aide to Sen. Sanders, who plans to propose including the expansion in Democrats' reconciliation package.
Workers in Ithaca say closure represents pure opposition from Starbucks, whose CEO says he will "never embrace the union."
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