Medicare theft
IRA made plan to steal from entitlement
This image is a sample Medicare card and came via Medicare.
The Medicare scam that has unfolded since passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) would be the only thing being talked about in this election if a Republican had hatched a plan to steal from Medicare.
Since it unfolded in the Democratic Biden-Harris administration, its crickets from the media, Democrats, and everyone who screams bloody murder about anything impacting Medicare or Social Security.
After all, Social Security and Medicare are the third rail of American politics: touch them and you’re committing political suicide. Yet, both entitlement programs–Social Security for retirees and Medicare for senior citizen health benefits–are going insolvent. Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, and future Americans will face the brunt of reduced benefits.
That’s what makes taking money from Medicare and its Trust Fund so infuriating. No one should get away with the Biden-Harris administration’s two-pronged scheme in the IRA which was passed in 2022. It worked this way:
Biden-Harris took money from Medicare to pay for electric vehicle tax credits in the IRA.
Biden-Harris is taking money from the Medicare Trust Fund to hide Medicare premium hikes until after the election.
Jamie Joseph reported for Fox Business Oct. 12:
Under the Inflation Reduction Act, which was intended to cap out-of-pocket drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries, insurers are poised to significantly hike monthly premiums, with average bids for Part D plans expected to triple by 2025.
In response to potential voter backlash, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) rolled out a three-year ‘demonstration project’ to subsidize these premiums, aiming to keep them artificially low.
Federal lawmakers not only used Medicare to fund electric vehicle tax credits, Team Biden-Harris crafted a Medicare drug price control program to delay price hikes until after the election, with this scheme derailing creation of new drugs.
This is a huge issue that has been lost in the election.
This is the C-SPAN image of the final U.S. House of Representatives vote tally on passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. This image comes via the Northwest Progressive Institute.
The Wall Street Journal examined this issue August 14:
The IRA let Medicare ‘negotiate’ prices for 10 to 20 drugs a year and a total of 60 by 2029. Negotiate is a euphemism for extortion: Drug makers that don’t participate or reject the government’s price face a daily excise tax that starts at 186% and climbs to 1,900% of a drug’s daily revenue.
The law also requires manufacturers to pay the government rebates on medicines sold to Medicare if they raise prices more than the rate of inflation, and puts them on the hook for more of the entitlement’s Part D costs. Democrats used the resulting estimated “savings” of some $160 billion to pay for the green new deal.
But subsidized solar panels won’t help if you get sick. The inevitable, albeit invisible, result of Democrats’ raid on pharmaceutical companies will be fewer new medicines.
Roche CEO Thomas Schinecker said last summer that ‘we have decided that we are not going to do certain trials, or that we are not going to do a merger or acquisition or licensing [deal] because it is becoming financially not viable.’
AstraZeneca also warned that it might delay launching some cancer medicines because of the IRA.
The Missouri Times cast light on this issue in September, before it had the attention and air time on Fox Business and Fox News. It stated:
Just recently, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) reported the Part D base beneficiary premium costs—which increased by a staggering 179%—and arbitrarily added a new ‘demo’ to limit premium increases in standalone Part D plans, which roughly eleven million seniors are enrolled in. In the Biden-Harris code, this means that the administration will further subsidize big insurers to the tune of $72 billion over the next three years via the new ‘demo’ project from the Medicare Trust Funds, further eroding the program’s financial security. That way, seniors will only see a $2 increase per month on average. All told, that puts the entire IRA raid on Medicare at well over $330 billion.
It’s theft of Medicare. It’s a scandal and it should lead to political punishment to the party responsible for it.
Worse they’re hiding it from voters in an election year, which possibly violates the Hatch Act.
U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ken., sent a letter to Corey Amundson, the head of the Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice, to determine if the financial game to hide premium increases violates the Hatch Act, which prohibits political activity conducted in an official capacity.
Julia Johnson wrote the following for Fox Business:
‘My colleagues and I are concerned that the Biden-Harris Administration is inappropriately using taxpayer funds to mask the defective Medicare Part D policies enacted as part of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 (P.L. 117-169),’ Paul wrote to Corey Amundson, the Chief of the Public Integrity Section at the DOJ. ‘Given the IRA’s central role in the Biden-Harris Administration’s presidential campaign, these concerns warrant additional investigation.’
The likelihood of the possible Hatch Act violation being investigated and determined before the election is unlikely.
The person who had this Medicare theft added to this bill needs to be exposed and run out of U.S. politics.
The Democrats must be harmed politically for allowing this to become law.
