Medicare Advantage Peddlers Are Concerned About Retirees’ Anxiety!?!
Medicare Advantage health insurance plans that must deny care in order to make money—are anxiety-making machines!
By Joe Maniscalco
Whether you rightly want to it gall or chutzpah, the corporate profiteers peddling Medicare Advantage health insurance plans to retirees across the country have once again revealed just how craven and hollow inside they really are with their preposterous new ads promising recipients $900 grocery allowances.
Imagine, the Medicare Advantage commercials that started popping up again this month on local streaming services in New York say, not having to deal with the anxiety and worry that comes from reaching the grocery store check-out and not knowing if you’ve got enough to cover the total.
Incredible, astonishing, and sickening. For the last four years, we at Work-Bites have interviewed scores of Medicare Advantage recipients, and those actively being pushed into the profit-driven health insurance plans, who have expressed nothing but the most profound anxiety and worry about not being able to access the care they need when they need it.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, DC 37 Executive Director Henry Garrido, and everybody else who is working hard to suppress legislation to protect the Traditional Medicare benefits of municipal retirees may not want to acknowledge it—or maybe they just don’t care—but Medicare Advantage health insurance plans that must deny care in order to make money—are anxiety-making machines. They pump it out by the truckload. None-stop. Day and night. Year-round.
And now they’re trying to sell themselves as anxiety-busters? Right now, there are countless municipal retirees living throughout New York City and other places across the country who go to bed each night with their guts tied up in knots worrying about how they or their loved ones will be able to get the procedure or treatment their doctors say they need.
Last summer, the American Medical Association conducted a survey and found that nine out of 10 physicians believe the prior authorizations that come with profit-driven Medicare Advantage plans have a negative impact on patient clinical outcomes.
Practically all of the physicians surveyed—94 percent—said prior authorization “always, often or sometimes delays patients’ accessing necessary care.”
That’s anxiety.
In October, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden [D-Oregon], ranking member of the Finance Committee, along with Representatives Frank Pallone Jr. [D-New Jersey] and Richard E. Neal [D-Massachusetts], told the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services [CMS] that they the were concerned about “ongoing problems with Medicare Advantage (MA) that seem to be getting worse.”
“[Medicare Advantage] plan use of prior authorization has skyrocketed–reaching 46 million requests in 2022 – burdening health care providers and delaying care,” they wrote. “Prior authorization–which some enrollees are calling “deny first”–is a problem across multiple procedures, including for enrollees who need post-acute care. At the heart of the problem is that plans are not following even the modest rules CMS has put into place.”
That’s anxiety.
Sixteen years ago, nutty Sarah Palin ran around warning everybody that “death panels” were going to be created to determine who was “worthy of medical care.”
Today, those “death panels” are a reality—although not in the daffy way Palin predicted.
“Recent news reports and a Congressional investigation,” Wyden and co. further told CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure last fall, “raise serious concerns around how insurers are targeting certain types of care, and their reliance on algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) tools to make coverage determinations.”
AI dictating whether or not you or your loved ones get the care they need when they need it.
That’s anxiety.
Nevertheless, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, at the urging of DC 37 Executive Director Henry Garido and his supporters inside the Municipal Labor Council [MLC], has devoted much of his time in office thus far, adding to and compounding that anxiety in a relentless campaign to push 250,000 municipal retirees into an Aetna Medicare Advantage health insurance plan. Never mind that judges—including those presiding over the highest court in the state—have continually ruled against those efforts.
TWU Local 100 President Richard Davis, too, has devoted much of his time in office attempting to smear retirees bucking the Medicare Advantage push and herding retired Transit workers into a Medicare Advantage plan they do not want.
Never mind that other labor leaders representing Transit workers have denounced the Medicare Advantage push and all those behind it.
“How many times do we have to keep winning in court for this to be over?” retirees steadfastly fighting for their Traditional Medicare coverage constantly tell us at Work-Bites.
More anxiety and more worry.
None of this, however, can be accurately understood without looking at the broader context of the way things are designed to work against working class people. For example, this week, New York City rolled out congestion pricing and started slapping a $9 fee on drivers trying to enter Manhattan below and including 60th Street. The cost to ride the Subway—that rolling warehouse for mentally ill New Yorkers also denied care—is set to increase to $3.00 later this summer.
"We don’t expect New Yorkers to overnight change their behavior. Everybody’s going to have to adjust to this,” MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber told reporters this week.
Easy for him to say, right? Lieber rakes in more than $400,000 a year at his job.
New York State could pass legislation by State Senator James Sanders Jr. and Assembly Member Phil Speck to finally repeal the stock transfer tax rebate and raise $13 billion or more annually for transportation, education, health care and other vital needs. But there is virtually zero “political will” from those with their hands on the levers of power to do that.
But burden working class people with more financial stress, anxiety and worry? Well, there’s plenty of “political will” to do that.
No one is saying that there aren’t financial challenges, what we at Work-Bites are saying—based on the factual reporting we do—is that the only answer to those challenges we ever get is to further burden those who can least afford it.
The ongoing campaign to strip municipal retirees of the the Traditional Medicare coverage they’ve already earned and push them into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage plan where they can expect nothing but delays and denials of care, along with dwindling pools of participating doctors and hospitals, is just another glaring example of that fact.