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| Home Front: Politix |
| Biden spent billions to delay Medicare premiums spike, protect Harris campaign before election |
| 2024-11-05 |
| [JustTheNews] Seniors groups warn that Biden budget gimmickry means "taxpayers are footing the bill today, seniors will pay the price tomorrow." Democrats were confronted earlier this year with a terrifying reality: a cap on out-of-pocket costs for patients to limit Medicare drug spending passed as part of Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act was set to spike premiums for millions of senior citizens just weeks before the 2024 presidential election. To avoid the political catastrophe of presiding over major premium increases in the middle of a closely contested election, the Biden-Harris administration used its authority to reroute appropriated funding to subsidize the premiums for seniors until after the election. The administration’s $5 billion budget gimmick kicked the proverbial can down the road, but only adds to the estimated possible $20 billion in additional spending over three years to cover up the unintended consequences of one of the Biden-Harris administration's signature laws. While they free Democratic nominee Kamala Harris to tout the caps in her key economic plan for the middle class, the subsidies will cost taxpayers and seniors in the long run. “They created a new program that's going to send billions to health insurance companies… to temporarily offset the premium increases,” Rebecca Weber, the CEO of the Association for Mature American Citizens (AMAC) told the John Solomon Reports podcast. “One could really say that they're buying, you know, off big insurance companies right before an election. And taxpayers, this is important, that people understanding it, taxpayers are footing the bill today, seniors will pay the price tomorrow,” she added. Medicare Part D premiums were slated to increase in October at the beginning of open enrollment following pressure on insurance companies generated by the Inflation Reduction Act’s caps on drug prices—one of the Biden-Harris Administration’s signature legislative initiatives. This could have spelled political disaster for Democrats and their nominee, who bragged that she cast the tie-breaking vote on the legislation. But the administration swooped in to prevent the catastrophe. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced in July a new program to stabilize the premiums, called a demonstration. This program would shell out a total of approximately $5 billion in subsidies for insurance companies to cover the costs of capping prices and other effects of the Inflation Reduction Act. Before the subsidies, the price cap plan was already set to balloon federal spending after the Congressional Budget Office found the Inflation Reduction Act’s financial impacts were underestimated. The analysis, requested by Republican critics of the administration’s plans, said the changes made to Medicare by the act would likely cause the new average plan bid for standard Part D coverage to increase by a whopping 179% for 2025 without intervention. “CBO expects that the additional plan costs reflected in those bids will result in an increase in federal spending of $10 billion to $20 billion in calendar year 2025, compared with our earlier projections,” the CBO said. |
| Posted by:Skidmark |