July 21st, 2022

Under REACH, traditional Medicare
​is quietly being handed to Wall Street

Background: In 2016, the Trump administration introduced a program that contracts with private entities to do Medicare’s job of paying the bills of enrollees. The contractors are given a fixed amount of money to cover a given number of patients. They can keep up to 40% of the money to do what traditional Medicare does with only a 2 percent overhead.
The essential elements of this program are being continued under the Biden administration’s REACH program. The Medicare and Medicaid Center for Innovation has announced that it plans to force all seniors into this program by 2030, completely privatizing Medicare. Traditional Medicare will be eliminated, leaving a system with all the problems of private insurance that is much more expensive than even Medicare Advantage.
Consequences of REACH:  

• Enrollees who’ve chosen traditional Medicare are forced into private plans. 
• Patients lose choice of providers due to restricted provider panels. 
• An incentive was created to deny care to maximize profit. 
• Inappropriate denials of care and payment increase death and morbidity. 
• Taxpayers and enrollees are forced to pay for an outrageously expensive system that prioritizes maximizing profits over patient care outcomes. 
• Privatizing Medicare will make it virtually impossible to create an efficient and high quality system of universal, publicly funded health care. 
• Unless the President halts the program, Congress is powerless to act.   

What you can do:  

1. Write, call, and email your members of Congress telling them to demand that Biden act. Find their contact information at congress.gov/members. 
2. Speak up at town halls during the August recess. 
3. Write letters to the editor. 
4. Share this with friends, coworkers, neighbors, and groups to which you belong. 
5. Learn more at Physicians for a National Health Program: pnhp.org 

Information provided by Rick Staggenborg, Linn County Democrat and Linn County chair of Health Care for All Oregon.