Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!!!

 

While the Biden Administration, Congress and the mainstream media are focused on discrediting the proponents of single payer healthcare, Wall Street investors are quietly moving to privatize Medicare and Medicaid to complete their control over the entire medical system.

If you are on Medicare, you have probably been bombarded with advertisements for Medicare Advantage, which is one of the insidious ways that Medicare is being undermined. Now comes the Direct Contracting model, with so-called Direct Contracting Entities (DCEs), which get paid monthly by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to cover a specified portion of a patient's medical care—a significant shift from traditional Medicare's direct reimbursement of providers. These “middlemen” will now control what treatments are available and to whom. And they will extract profits for their investors by – you guessed it – finding ways to deny care.

What is even more outrageous is that this change to someone’s Medicare or Medicaid coverage can be done WITHOUT the knowledge of the individual! Wall Street and private equity firms are salivating over the prospect. Rather than allowing patients to go to providers directly as they do under traditional Medicare, DCEs invite insurers and investors to step in and interfere with the care that we get. Billed as a way for Medicare to cut costs, it turns over to these private entities the role of rationing healthcare.

The Direct Contracting model was introduced under Trump, but has been allowed to proceed, for the most part, under the Biden administration, despite a few voices raised in Congress. Currently a group of physicians from around the nation is working to grab the notice of lawmakers, the Biden White House, and the public by traveling to Washington, D.C. and demanding that the Health and Human Services Department immediately stop the experiment, known as Direct Contracting (DC).

Healthcare represents approximately 18% of the GDP. With Big Pharma, large private health insurance providers, and the privatizing and consolidation of hospitals and physicians’ groups all under the control of “investors”, they have turned to Medicare and Medicaid to squeeze even more profit out of ordinary Americans and into the pockets of the 1%.

Think about it this way. The term “for profit healthcare” explains what it is all about – the “profit” comes first and the “healthcare” is whatever is left over.