Portside

Rising tide in Capital’s sewage drains

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.

Reforms are needed to ensure that inaccurate budgetary math doesn’t take precedence over maximizing long-term prosperity.

Junior doctors in Britain began a four-day strike over pay on Tuesday that is likely to cause unprecedented disruption to the state-funded National Health Service (NHS), prompting the government to warn of a risk to patient safety.

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.

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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.

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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.