Medicare or Advantage Plans

A Viewpoint

Starting next week, private health insurance corporations will launch a multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign aimed at seniors, hoping to convince them to ditch traditional Medicare and sign up for expensive, ineffective private plans. 

We are fighting back.

Social Security Works is launching a campaign to defend traditional Medicare from greedy private insurers who are bankrupting the Medicare system. 

New reporting from the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission revealed how deep the rot goes:¹

Their goal is to eliminate traditional Medicare and replace it with fully privatized plans that they can loot for cash. 

This decades-long PR campaign has already chipped away at Medicare enrollments, driving more and more seniors to privatized insurance corporations that make false promises about better care and lower costs. Their promises couldn’t be further from the truth.

Traditional Medicare promises simple, universal coverage and that’s what it delivers. 

Privatized plans delay and deny necessary care. Their business model literally involves delaying care until people die in order to save money. And if that isn’t enough, they raid the Medicare trust fund with $75 billion in fraudulent charges every year.

Privatized plans Orwellianly call themselves Medicare Advantage. But the only ones who are at an advantage from those plans are greedy CEOs and Wall Street speculators who profit from death. 

These corporate insurance giants spend millions every year on slick Madison Avenue firms to rope in more seniors who are just looking for a better deal. It’s a trick―but it’s an appealing one.

Instead of investing further in a private health insurance system, we should improve and expand traditional Medicare―allowing it to offer dental, vision, long-term care and hearing benefits that private plans use to differentiate themselves. Medicare’s promise of simple, universal coverage must be kept, not destroyed for the sake of profits. 

In solidarity,

Michael Phelan
Social Security Works

¹ https://www.levernews.com/insurers-are-gaming-medicare-to-the-tune-of-140_billion/