[August]

Here's a much bigger lie about Medicare that will actually matter:

Thanks to the IRA, Part D Is Fighting for Its Life


The Biden Administration continues to pretend that it’s been protecting Medicare and the seniors who depend on it, but last week the Health and Human Services (HHS) bureaucracy was forced to pull out all the stops to mask the havoc caused by their signature legislative achievement, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
Each year, insurance plans submit bids to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for the right to offer prescription drug coverage to Medicare beneficiaries. These bids provide CMS with information about the package of benefits offered and the cost of offering these benefits. CMS summarizes this information for the public at the end of each July, and usually includes information about average premiums. For years, premiums have been stable and even exhibited declines as they did over the course of the Trump Administration.


Last year, the first year the IRA’s Part D changes started to take effect, premiums increased 21 percent. Policymakers and insurance plans have been warning that this year would be even worse, but the Administration ignored these warnings, and publicly predicted premiums this year would be stable. But as the final bids came in from plans, reality set in.
CMS delayed announcing the premiums and instead suddenly unveiled a three-year Premium Stabilization Demonstration. The new demonstration, announced100 days before a Presidential election, allows CMS to assume more of the plans’ costs by injecting taxpayer dollars into the program and mute the IRA’s massive inflationary effects.


CMS’s lack of transparency and the haphazard creation of this demonstration program—plans have only been given a week to decide if they will participate—suggests the Agency should have more carefully considered what plans had been telling it for months: they could not participate in the program and seniors would lose coverage if something drastic wasn’t done.
The effort CMS is investing to hide the program’s collapse is shocking even to those of us who expected trouble. The bid announcement included information on how much plans believe it will cost them to cover an average beneficiary each month. To call the increase an explosion would be an understatement; since 2023, just after the IRA was passed, the cost to provide benefits has increased a whopping 417 percent.

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/arti...e_1050305.html