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Activists rally to demand an expansion of Medicare in Washington, D.C. on July 30, 2021. (Photo: Social Security Works/Twitter)
Progressive healthcare activists marked Medicare's 56th anniversary Friday by delivering more than 125,000 petitions urging Congress to lower the popular program's eligibility age and expand its coverage to include vision, hearing, and dental services--upgrades that proponents say are long overdue to help protect seniors from soaring out-of-pocket costs.
"Now, as a doctor I can tell you: Your eyes, your ears, and your teeth are connected to your body," Dr. Sanjeev Sriram, an adviser to the advocacy group Social Security Works, said during a rally on Capitol Hill. "I did not have to go to medical school to tell y'all this, but apparently I do have to tell Congress this."
"These things are not luxury items. Your teeth are not luxury items," Sriram continued. "We can make Medicare cover dental care when we start making changes and stop making excuses. The 56th anniversary is as good as any other occasion to expand Medicare to cover more people, to do the work that has not been done for generations."
The groups' petition specifically demands that Democrats in Congress prioritize:
"We can't let Congress pass up this chance to transform our healthcare system for the better," the document reads. "Tell the House and Senate to include a plan for strengthening Medicare in a final reconciliation package!"
"We need Medicare for All. In fact, we needed Medicare for All yesterday."
--Rep. Pramila Jayapal
The petition delivery came after Senate Democratic leaders agreed to include a substantial expansion of Medicare coverage in a recently unveiled $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation proposal. But, as it stands, the measure would not lower the program's eligibility age from 65 to 60, a move that would extend the program's coverage to 23 million people.
In a virtual speech to the activists gathered in Washington, D.C. on Friday, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) argued that Congress now has a "historic opportunity" to build on Medicare, which currently covers roughly 62 million people.
Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, is calling for a both a lower Medicare eligibility age and the inclusion of dental, hearing, and vision coverage in the forthcoming reconciliation package.
"I'm also pushing to go further. Now more than ever, we need to guarantee healthcare for everyone, as a human right," said Jayapal, the lead House sponsor of the Medicare for All Act of 2021. "Healthcare without co-pays, private insurance premiums, deductibles, and other out-of-pocket costs. We need Medicare for All. In fact, we needed Medicare for All yesterday, when nearly 100 million people were uninsured or underinsured in the richest nation on the planet."
Supporters of Medicare expansion, including the activists who demonstrated on Capitol Hill Friday, are urging Congress to fund the new benefits by allowing Medicare to directly negotiate prescription drug prices with pharmaceutical companies--which it is currently barred from doing under federal law. A recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) study commissioned by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) found that people in the U.S. pay two to four times more for prescription drugs than the residents of other rich countries.
"It is time to end the international disgrace of Americans paying the highest prices in the world, by far, for prescription drugs," Sanders said in virtual remarks at Friday's rally. "The time is now, more than 50 years later, to fully realize the vision of what Medicare is supposed to be about."
\u201cMedicare is 56 years old today. It\u2019s past time to strengthen and #ExpandMedicare by:\n\n\u2714 Adding hearing, dental, and vision benefits, as well as an out-of-pocket cap\n\u2714 Lowering the eligibility age\n\u2714 Empowering Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices\n\n#MM56\u201d— Partners for Dignity & Rights (Formerly NESRI) (@Partners for Dignity & Rights (Formerly NESRI)) 1627658520
While some Medicare recipients receive dental, vision, and hearing coverage through more expensive Medicare Advantage plans, Medicaid, and employer-sponsored retiree plans, millions of seniors are left without such benefits each year.
According to a recent analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), around 24 million Medicare recipients did not have dental coverage in 2019.
"Average out-of-pocket spending on dental services among Medicare beneficiaries who had any dental service was $874 in 2018," KFF found. "One in five Medicare beneficiaries (20%) who used dental services spent more than $1,000 out-of-pocket on dental care.
In an op-ed for The Hill on Friday, Social Security Works president Nancy Altman wrote that "it makes no sense to exclude hearing, dental, and vision benefits from a program designed for seniors."
"Congressional Democrats are currently in the midst of crafting a reconciliation package that can, and should, include all of these benefit expansions," Altman added. "Strengthening and expanding Medicare is smart politics for any Democrat that wants to win reelection in 2022. More importantly, it's the morally right thing to do."
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Progressive healthcare activists marked Medicare's 56th anniversary Friday by delivering more than 125,000 petitions urging Congress to lower the popular program's eligibility age and expand its coverage to include vision, hearing, and dental services--upgrades that proponents say are long overdue to help protect seniors from soaring out-of-pocket costs.
"Now, as a doctor I can tell you: Your eyes, your ears, and your teeth are connected to your body," Dr. Sanjeev Sriram, an adviser to the advocacy group Social Security Works, said during a rally on Capitol Hill. "I did not have to go to medical school to tell y'all this, but apparently I do have to tell Congress this."
"These things are not luxury items. Your teeth are not luxury items," Sriram continued. "We can make Medicare cover dental care when we start making changes and stop making excuses. The 56th anniversary is as good as any other occasion to expand Medicare to cover more people, to do the work that has not been done for generations."
The groups' petition specifically demands that Democrats in Congress prioritize:
"We can't let Congress pass up this chance to transform our healthcare system for the better," the document reads. "Tell the House and Senate to include a plan for strengthening Medicare in a final reconciliation package!"
"We need Medicare for All. In fact, we needed Medicare for All yesterday."
--Rep. Pramila Jayapal
The petition delivery came after Senate Democratic leaders agreed to include a substantial expansion of Medicare coverage in a recently unveiled $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation proposal. But, as it stands, the measure would not lower the program's eligibility age from 65 to 60, a move that would extend the program's coverage to 23 million people.
In a virtual speech to the activists gathered in Washington, D.C. on Friday, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) argued that Congress now has a "historic opportunity" to build on Medicare, which currently covers roughly 62 million people.
Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, is calling for a both a lower Medicare eligibility age and the inclusion of dental, hearing, and vision coverage in the forthcoming reconciliation package.
"I'm also pushing to go further. Now more than ever, we need to guarantee healthcare for everyone, as a human right," said Jayapal, the lead House sponsor of the Medicare for All Act of 2021. "Healthcare without co-pays, private insurance premiums, deductibles, and other out-of-pocket costs. We need Medicare for All. In fact, we needed Medicare for All yesterday, when nearly 100 million people were uninsured or underinsured in the richest nation on the planet."
Supporters of Medicare expansion, including the activists who demonstrated on Capitol Hill Friday, are urging Congress to fund the new benefits by allowing Medicare to directly negotiate prescription drug prices with pharmaceutical companies--which it is currently barred from doing under federal law. A recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) study commissioned by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) found that people in the U.S. pay two to four times more for prescription drugs than the residents of other rich countries.
"It is time to end the international disgrace of Americans paying the highest prices in the world, by far, for prescription drugs," Sanders said in virtual remarks at Friday's rally. "The time is now, more than 50 years later, to fully realize the vision of what Medicare is supposed to be about."
\u201cMedicare is 56 years old today. It\u2019s past time to strengthen and #ExpandMedicare by:\n\n\u2714 Adding hearing, dental, and vision benefits, as well as an out-of-pocket cap\n\u2714 Lowering the eligibility age\n\u2714 Empowering Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices\n\n#MM56\u201d— Partners for Dignity & Rights (Formerly NESRI) (@Partners for Dignity & Rights (Formerly NESRI)) 1627658520
While some Medicare recipients receive dental, vision, and hearing coverage through more expensive Medicare Advantage plans, Medicaid, and employer-sponsored retiree plans, millions of seniors are left without such benefits each year.
According to a recent analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), around 24 million Medicare recipients did not have dental coverage in 2019.
"Average out-of-pocket spending on dental services among Medicare beneficiaries who had any dental service was $874 in 2018," KFF found. "One in five Medicare beneficiaries (20%) who used dental services spent more than $1,000 out-of-pocket on dental care.
In an op-ed for The Hill on Friday, Social Security Works president Nancy Altman wrote that "it makes no sense to exclude hearing, dental, and vision benefits from a program designed for seniors."
"Congressional Democrats are currently in the midst of crafting a reconciliation package that can, and should, include all of these benefit expansions," Altman added. "Strengthening and expanding Medicare is smart politics for any Democrat that wants to win reelection in 2022. More importantly, it's the morally right thing to do."
Progressive healthcare activists marked Medicare's 56th anniversary Friday by delivering more than 125,000 petitions urging Congress to lower the popular program's eligibility age and expand its coverage to include vision, hearing, and dental services--upgrades that proponents say are long overdue to help protect seniors from soaring out-of-pocket costs.
"Now, as a doctor I can tell you: Your eyes, your ears, and your teeth are connected to your body," Dr. Sanjeev Sriram, an adviser to the advocacy group Social Security Works, said during a rally on Capitol Hill. "I did not have to go to medical school to tell y'all this, but apparently I do have to tell Congress this."
"These things are not luxury items. Your teeth are not luxury items," Sriram continued. "We can make Medicare cover dental care when we start making changes and stop making excuses. The 56th anniversary is as good as any other occasion to expand Medicare to cover more people, to do the work that has not been done for generations."
The groups' petition specifically demands that Democrats in Congress prioritize:
"We can't let Congress pass up this chance to transform our healthcare system for the better," the document reads. "Tell the House and Senate to include a plan for strengthening Medicare in a final reconciliation package!"
"We need Medicare for All. In fact, we needed Medicare for All yesterday."
--Rep. Pramila Jayapal
The petition delivery came after Senate Democratic leaders agreed to include a substantial expansion of Medicare coverage in a recently unveiled $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation proposal. But, as it stands, the measure would not lower the program's eligibility age from 65 to 60, a move that would extend the program's coverage to 23 million people.
In a virtual speech to the activists gathered in Washington, D.C. on Friday, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) argued that Congress now has a "historic opportunity" to build on Medicare, which currently covers roughly 62 million people.
Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, is calling for a both a lower Medicare eligibility age and the inclusion of dental, hearing, and vision coverage in the forthcoming reconciliation package.
"I'm also pushing to go further. Now more than ever, we need to guarantee healthcare for everyone, as a human right," said Jayapal, the lead House sponsor of the Medicare for All Act of 2021. "Healthcare without co-pays, private insurance premiums, deductibles, and other out-of-pocket costs. We need Medicare for All. In fact, we needed Medicare for All yesterday, when nearly 100 million people were uninsured or underinsured in the richest nation on the planet."
Supporters of Medicare expansion, including the activists who demonstrated on Capitol Hill Friday, are urging Congress to fund the new benefits by allowing Medicare to directly negotiate prescription drug prices with pharmaceutical companies--which it is currently barred from doing under federal law. A recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) study commissioned by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) found that people in the U.S. pay two to four times more for prescription drugs than the residents of other rich countries.
"It is time to end the international disgrace of Americans paying the highest prices in the world, by far, for prescription drugs," Sanders said in virtual remarks at Friday's rally. "The time is now, more than 50 years later, to fully realize the vision of what Medicare is supposed to be about."
\u201cMedicare is 56 years old today. It\u2019s past time to strengthen and #ExpandMedicare by:\n\n\u2714 Adding hearing, dental, and vision benefits, as well as an out-of-pocket cap\n\u2714 Lowering the eligibility age\n\u2714 Empowering Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices\n\n#MM56\u201d— Partners for Dignity & Rights (Formerly NESRI) (@Partners for Dignity & Rights (Formerly NESRI)) 1627658520
While some Medicare recipients receive dental, vision, and hearing coverage through more expensive Medicare Advantage plans, Medicaid, and employer-sponsored retiree plans, millions of seniors are left without such benefits each year.
According to a recent analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), around 24 million Medicare recipients did not have dental coverage in 2019.
"Average out-of-pocket spending on dental services among Medicare beneficiaries who had any dental service was $874 in 2018," KFF found. "One in five Medicare beneficiaries (20%) who used dental services spent more than $1,000 out-of-pocket on dental care.
In an op-ed for The Hill on Friday, Social Security Works president Nancy Altman wrote that "it makes no sense to exclude hearing, dental, and vision benefits from a program designed for seniors."
"Congressional Democrats are currently in the midst of crafting a reconciliation package that can, and should, include all of these benefit expansions," Altman added. "Strengthening and expanding Medicare is smart politics for any Democrat that wants to win reelection in 2022. More importantly, it's the morally right thing to do."
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy called President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs "a political weapon designed to collapse our democracy."
Analysts puzzling over the bizarre formula the Trump administration used to calculate its country-by-country tariff rates are wasting their time, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy said in a response to the American president that has gone viral in recent days as global markets continue to nosedive.
"It's not economic policy, it's not trade policy," Murphy (D-Conn.) said in remarks recorded after Trump announced the sweeping tariffs last week. "It's a political weapon designed to collapse our democracy."
While President Donald Trump's universal tariffs on imports make no sense as an effort to rectify the failures of the status quo trade regime and bring back offshored U.S. jobs, they are comprehensible when viewed as "a tool to try to compel pledges of loyalty, this time from companies and industries in the United States," Murphy argued.
"You have to understand that everything Donald Trump is doing is in service of staying in power forever—either him or his family or his handpicked successors," the Democratic senator continued. "He's trying to destroy our democracy."
Murphy contended that the president designed the tariffs to be so widespread that corporations across private industry would have to come to the White House and "make an agreement with Trump in which he gives them tariff relief in exchange for a pledge of political loyalty."
"What could that pledge look like?" Murphy continued. "Well, maybe they agree to champion his economic policy publicly. Maybe they agree to make contributions to his political campaign. Maybe they agree to police their employees to make sure that nobody that works for that company works for the political opposition."
Politico reported late last week that businesses across corporate America "fear Trump's wrath" and are thus declining to criticize the president's tariff policies even as they wreak havoc worldwide and threaten to spark a devastating recession.
"There is zero incentive for any company or brand to be remotely critical of this administration," one unnamed public affairs operative told Politico. "It destroys your ability to work with the White House and advance your policies, period."
"While the United States has plenty of real problems to deal with, Trump is ignoring them to manufacture the fake emergencies he needs to further enlarge and centralize his power."
Murphy is hardly alone in seeing Trump's tariffs as an instrument of power consolidation.
Robert Reich, the former U.S. labor secretary, wrote Monday that "we're turning into a dictatorship" as Trump conjures "fake national emergencies" to jack up tariffs, deport people en masse without due process, gut efforts to combat the climate crisis, and dismantle large swaths of the federal government.
"As Trump declares emergency after emergency to justify his reign of terror, he's simultaneously eliminating America's capacity to respond to real emergencies," Reich wrote. "Make no mistake about what’s really going on here. While the United States has plenty of real problems to deal with, Trump is ignoring them to manufacture the fake emergencies he needs to further enlarge and centralize his power."
One analyst, Zack Beauchamp of Vox, argued the tariffs are more a symptom of the decline of U.S. democracy rather than a cause of it.
"Trump's tariffs will, if fully implemented, be remembered as their own cautionary tale. While he campaigned on them, he wouldn't have been able to implement the entire tariff package had he gone through the normal constitutionally prescribed procedure for raising taxes," Beauchamp wrote. "The fact that America isn't functioning like a normal democracy, with public deliberation and multiple checks on executive authority, is what allowed Trump to act on his idiosyncratic ideas in the manner of a Mao or Putin."
"It's still possible that Trump steps back from the brink," he added. "But even if he does, and the worst outcome is avoided, the lesson should be clear: The long decay of America's democratic system means that we are all living under an axe. And if this isn't the moment it falls, there will surely be another."
"If the 4.8% fall in S&P 500 futures at the Asian opening isn't reversed, then it's on course for its worst three-day selloff since the Black Monday crash of October 1987."
U.S. President Donald Trump late Sunday openly embraced the global chaos sparked by his sweeping tariffs, careening headlong into a potentially catastrophic trade war as worldwide financial markets plummeted and American retirees began to panic.
In a post on his social media platform, Trump declared that his tariffs are "already in effect, and a beautiful thing to behold."
"Some day people will realize that Tariffs, for the United States of America, are a very beautiful thing!" Trump wrote as recent retirees and people near retirement expressed fear and astonishment at the swift damage the president's policy decisions have done to their investment accounts.
One retiree, a 68-year-old former occupational health worker in New Jersey, told NBC News that she is "just kind of stunned, and with so much money in the market, we just sort of have to hope we have enough time to recover."
"What we've been doing is trying to enjoy the time that we have, but you want to be able to make it last," the retiree, identified as Paula, said on Friday. "I have no confidence here."
Trump's post doubling down on his tariff regime came as Asian markets cratered and U.S. stock futures opened bright red, signaling that Monday will bring another broad sell-off in equities. One of Trump's top economic advisers claimed in a Sunday interview that the president is not intentionally crashing the stock market, even as Trump—returning from a weekend golf outing in Florida—characterized the tariffs as "medicine."
"I don't want anything to go down," the president said. "But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something."
Bloomberg's John Authers wrote early Sunday that "if the 4.8% fall in S&P 500 futures at the Asian opening isn't reversed, then it's on course for its worst three-day selloff since the Black Monday crash of October 1987."
Though the stock market and the economy are not synonymous, economist Josh Bivens recently noted that they are currently "mirroring each other: Stock market weakness is reflecting broader economic weakness."
"While the stock market isn't the economy, the stock market declines we have seen in recent weeks are genuinely worrying," wrote Bivens, the chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute. "They are a symptom of much larger dysfunctional macroeconomic policy that will likely soon start showing up in higher unemployment and slower wage growth for the vast majority."
"This was an illegal act," said U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis.
A federal court judge on Sunday declared the Trump administration's refusal to return a man they sent to an El Salvadoran prison in "error" as "totally lawless" behavior and ordered the Department of Homeland Security to repatriate the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, within 24 hours.
In a 22-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis doubled down on an order issued Friday, which Department of Justice lawyers representing the administration said was an affront to his executive authority.
"This was an illegal act," Xinis said of DHS Secretary Krisi Noem's attack on Abrego Garcia's rights, including his deportation and imprisonment.
"Defendants seized Abrego Garcia without any lawful authority; held him in three separate domestic detention centers without legal basis; failed to present him to any immigration judge or officer; and forcibly transported him to El Salvador in direct contravention of [immigration law]," the decision states.
Once imprisoned in El Salvador, the order continues, "U.S. officials secured his detention in a facility that, by design, deprives its detainees of adequate food, water, and shelter, fosters routine violence; and places him with his persecutors."
Trump's DOJ appealed Friday's order to 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Virginia, but that court has not yet ruled on the request to stay the order from Xinis, which says Abrego Garcia should be returned to the United States no later than Monday.