While the shitshow known as Trump 2.0 accelerates into chaos (see this post from Mister Mix: Decompensating), I want to turn to healthcare and healthcare adjacent issues.
I made the mistake of being lured in to an editorial from the Wall Street Journal with the headline, “The Truth About Medicare Advantage” (gift link). For some stupid reason, I thought the opinion might be that Medicare Advantage is bad.
Silly, silly me. 🤦🏻♂️
Here is a taste. It opens with:
“The Trump Administration is considering automatically enrolling Medicare beneficiaries in private insurance plans—aka Medicare Advantage—as a default. This may be the single most effective way to reduce Medicare waste, fraud and abuse. So why do Democrats oppose it?
Democrats are trying to flip the script by claiming that Medicare Advantage is wasting money. Insurers, Democratic Senators last week wrote to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), “are endangering the solvency of the Medicare Trust Funds.” This misinformation deserves a rebuttal.”
And it closes with:
“Democrats dislike Advantage because they prefer government-run healthcare, though the latter has higher costs. The opposition to Advantage is ideological, no matter the facts.”
Projection much?
I’ve posted about the scam that is Medicare Advantage before. Here is an excerpt:
While I’ll write more about healthcare in the future, let’s just be really clear: Medicare Advantage is a scam, simply a means to transfer healthcare dollars from taxpayers to private companies like United Healthcare, Aetna and Cigna.
All we need to do is remember why we needed Medicare in the first place. Seniors are bad risks when it comes to health insurance simply because they have more health issues as they age (duh!) and it is simply nearly impossible for health insurers to make a profit on seniors. So, either there was no coverage for seniors, or the coverage premiums were prohibitively expensive. And as a society (back when we were a tad more compassionate than our current leadership), we decided we didn’t want our grandparents dying prematurely. The result? Voila - a government run insurance program that was NOT designed to make a profit, but solely to ensure seniors got the health care they needed (and deserved).
What couldn’t work for profit-driven insurers in the past (affordably insuring seniors) was never going to work now or in the future repackaged as Medicare Advantage - unless - the government paid private for-profit insurers with our tax dollars. And that is exactly how Medicare Advantage is structured today. Just another example of elected officials consciously redistributing wealth upwards.
The WSJ people throw out lots of stats without any links or backup data - and we all know numbers can be cherry-picked. I want to focus on the bigger picture.
Let’s go back to this quote from the Op-Ed: “Democrats dislike Advantage because they prefer government-run healthcare, though the latter has higher costs. The opposition to Advantage is ideological, no matter the facts.”
Traditional Medicare is a government run insurance program, not government-run healthcare. This is a key distinction. None of the medical providers in traditional Medicare are affiliated with the government. NONE. As I previously wrote, however, Medicare Advantage receives ALL of its revenue from… the government. To repeat, Medicare Advantage is simply a mechanism to transfer taxpayer dollars to private - mostly for-profit - healthcare insurers.
The WSJ Op-Ed also conveniently ignores the fact the Traditional Medicare has overhead in the 1-3% range while for-profit healthcare insurers have overhead in the 14-17% range (one peer-reviewed study in the American Journal of Managed Care validated administrative expenses for Medicare Parts A, B, and D at 1.35% of benefits in 2018, compared to 10.86% to 14.84% for Medicare Part C (Medicare Advantage, run by private insurers), while The Center for American Progress estimates that administrative costs for traditional Medicare and Medicaid hover around 2% to 5%, while those for private insurance run about 17%).
And at the highest level, what I previously wrote is still true: “All we need to do is remember why we needed Medicare in the first place. Seniors are bad risks when it comes to health insurance simply because they have more health issues as they age (duh!) and it is simply nearly impossible for health insurers to make a profit on seniors. So, either there was no coverage for seniors, or the coverage premiums were prohibitively expensive… What couldn’t work for profit-driven insurers in the past (affordably insuring seniors) was never going to work now or in the future repackaged as Medicare Advantage - unless - the government paid private for-profit insurers with our tax dollars.”
As we could have guessed - and many pointed out - fraud in Medicare Advantage is running rampant:
There are many more instances, but you get the idea. Because fraud is one of the few ways that Medicare Advantage makes sense for private, for-profit insurers (narrow networks, pre-approval requirements and denial of claims are the other ways). Medicare Advantage is a scam. It has all the hallmarks of our existing healthcare system where mostly private, for-profit insurers act as middleman to syphon off money to line their pockets in pursuit of profits and enriching C-Suite executives and shareholders without really producing much in the way of added value. The Medicare Advantage difference from our existing under-age-65 health insurance model is the money it syphons off comes not just from employers/individuals, but from all of us - the public - in the form of government taxpayer funds.
I ask the WSJ Op-Ed people - What is the difference between using taxpayer dollars to support a government-run health insurance program for seniors (Traditional Medicare) and using taxpayer dollars to support insurance programs run by private companies (Medicare Advantage)?
Who are the real ideological purists here? I think we know…
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And since we are talking about Medicare fraud, there’s this guy:
GOP senator fails history to defend Trump’s war crimes threat www.dailykos.com/stories/2026...
— Oliver Willis (@owillis.bsky.social) 2026-04-08T20:47:44.436Z
“If Democrats were in power when Lincoln had allowed Sherman to destroy the South, they would've impeached him. Or when Roosevelt destroyed the infrastructure of Germany, they would've impeached him. Or when Truman used an atomic bomb against Japan. These people are insane.”
Ummm… Democrats were in power during the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations, and in fact, Democrats were in charge when we fought and won WWII. Dumbass.
But this is also who Rick Scott is:
Oversaw the then largest Medicare Fraud in history while CEO of Columbia/HCA Healthcare. In December 2000, the DOJ announced what it called the largest government fraud settlement in U.S. history when Columbia/HCA agreed to pay $840 million in criminal fines and civil damages and penalties. The government settled a second series of similar claims in 2002 for an additional $881 million, bringing the total fine to $1.7 billion.
Scott skated. Scott was never indicted and never questioned in the case. Scott invoked the Fifth Amendment 75 times in a deposition as part of a civil case involving his time leading the company.
Scott got rich while overseeing the Fraud. He was paid $9.88 million in a settlement when he resigned, and left owning 10 million shares of stock then worth more than $350 million.
For the life of me, I cannot understand why, whenever anyone - but especially Democrats - refers to Rick Scott, they do not refer to him as “Rick Scott, who ran the company that perpetrated the largest Medicare Fraud in history and got rich doing it”.
C’mon Democrats. This is easy pickings!
