Direct Contracting – Medicare under Attack! - National Retiree Legislative Network

By Jake Johnson
Common Dreams, February 25, 2022

Rejecting pressure to terminate the program in its entirety, the Biden administration on Thursday announced it is redesigning a Trump-era experiment that physicians and progressive lawmakers have criticized as a scheme to fully privatize Medicare.

Instead of ending what’s known as the Direct Contracting model, which the Trump administration officially launched in 2020, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) gave the program a new name: ACO REACH, which stands for Accountable Care Organization Realizing Equity, Access, and Community Health.

Physicians Slam Industry Push to 'Fix'—Not End—Medicare Privatization Scheme By Jake Johnson, Common Dreams – Feb 16, 2022

Physicians and progressive advocates on Tuesday urged the Department of Health and Human Services to reject an industry appeal to tweak and rebrand—not end altogether—a Medicare privatization scheme known as Direct Contracting, which the Trump administration launched in 2020.

Members of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), which represents 24,000 doctors and other health professionals, has been working for months to bring lawmakers’ attention to the DC program and pressure the Biden administration to terminate it while it’s still in an experimental phase.

Biden pursues Trump plan that creates big profits by denying health care

By Diane Archer, AlterNet – Jan 8, 2022

In 2020, the Trump administration launched a plan to hand traditional Medicare over to Wall Street. Inexplicably, the Biden administration is playing along.

The overwhelming evidence demonstrates that the plan will drive up healthcare costs, inhibiting people from getting needed care.

So-called Direct Contracting Entities, DCEs, must pay for the care of the people assigned to them.

Here’s the sweet part for Wall Street: In addition to the normal profits from providing services, these firms can keep as much as 40 percent of the money they don’t spend on care.Talk about a financial incentive to deny treatments.

President Joe Biden won in part because of his commitment to science and data. Yet politics, so far, has gotten in the way of cost-effective health care.

The Biden administration is forcing our nation’s elderly into a new form of Medicare Advantage plans, against their will and generally without their knowledge or consent.

Stop New Plan to Destroy Original Medicare

TAKE ACTION NOW to tell President Biden and your members of congress to STOP the implementation of Direct Contracting before Original Medicare Beneficiaries are auto-enrolled in private insurance healthcare plans!

It only takes a few minutes to email the NRLN sample letter. Add your personal comments on why Original Medicare should not be privatized?

Read the latest on President Biden’s Push to Privatize Medicare!

Medicare Privatization Scheme Faced Legal Questions About Profiteering

By Ryan Grim & Austin Ahlman; The Intercept ~ Dec 14, 2021

In the final stretch of the Trump administration, government attorneys expressed ethics concerns about a Medicare privatization scheme being set up by Adam Boehler, a former dorm-mate of Jared Kushner’s who was made director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, also known as CMMI or the Innovation Center.

In January 2019, ahead of the launch of a new direct contracting model, the Office of the General Counsel for the Health and Human Services Department warned, in comments on a draft of the proposal, that it appeared as if the new project was being set up to benefit specific companies.

READ THE ARTICLE HERE: