DEAR EDITOR:

Each year during Medicare’s open enrollment period, for-profit insurance companies may offer Medicare Advantage (MA) plans to America’s seniors. This also means these companies may chip away at Medicare, our most important public health program, and they add to obstacles in our fight against privatization of Medicare.

Current projections indicate by next year, more than half of Medicare beneficiaries will have enrolled in MA. This would allow those profit-seeking corporations to “manage” health care of millions more American seniors, thereby essentially facilitating the corporations’ efforts to privatize U.S. “safety net” completely.

But wait! There’s more.

There is a little-known Medicare program called Direct Contracting, which has been infiltrating traditional Medicare, and this infiltration is escalating. The corporate entities which participate in Direct Contracting have compromised the health plans of nearly two million Medicare beneficiaries, often without those beneficiaries’ knowledge or consent. Starting Jan.1, 2023, another program called REACH will kick Direct Contracting into overdrive, allowing these same companies to greatly increase their profits by “managing” seniors’ health care — that is, by making decisions which should be left to the seniors and their doctors.

In fact, REACH incentivizes insurers to deny necessary health care. Under REACH, Medicare designates a specific amount of money for each beneficiary’s healthcare, and each beneficiary’s insurer is allowed to keep two-fifths of that money. The more care a senior receives, the less money is left for the insurance company to keep — and the insurance company is the sole decision maker of what care the senior receives.

While MA is already rife with problems primarily caused by corporate greed, at present patients at least have the choice between an Advantage plan or Traditional Medicare. REACH will take away that choice by “aligning” Medicare beneficiaries with corporate entities participating in REACH. This will be done without informing the beneficiaries, and without seeking their consent. In other words, if you are 65 or older, you will not be asked to participate; you will be assigned to one of these entities irrespective of your wishes.

Several current MA insurers have won approval to participate in the REACH program. By exploiting this new program, these companies are poised to extract millions of dollars from taxpayers, while denying care to seniors.

The open enrollment period is the perfect opportunity to highlight greed of commercial health insurers and dangers of allowing them to infiltrate Medicare further. I encourage seniors, and advocates for seniors, to do their research and educate themselves about dangers of Medicare Advantage, the looming threat of REACH and urgent need for a single-payer, “Medicare for all” system.

PAT RUSSO

Warren