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Dr. Oz Nomination Seen as Potential Boon for Medicare Privatization
"Dr. Oz wants to fully privatize Medicare," warned one advocacy group. "That’s why Donald Trump put him in charge of Medicare."
Nov 20, 2024
Dr. Mehmet Oz, whose unsuccessful 2022 Pennsylvania Senate bid included pitching voters on a plan to expand the privatized Medicare Advantage program, is now in a position to potentially actualize that plan.
President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that Oz, also known by his TV personality name Dr. Oz, is his pick to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
"Dr. Oz—a massive investor in Pharma—told the voters of Pennsylvania his plans to privatize Medicare… and they rejected him. Now Trump is giving him the authority to see his industry-approved plan carried through," wrote the progressive-leaning outlet The Lever, which covered Oz's support for Medicare Advantage back in 2022.
Through Medicare Advantage, which has been promoted by Trump and other congressional Republicans, seniors can opt out of traditional government-run Medicare health plans and instead choose plans administered by private insurers, such as UnitedHealthcare and Cigna.
According to The Lever's 2022 reporting, Oz pushed Medicare Advantage plans on his show The Dr. Oz Show and co-wrote a 2020 column for Forbes with a former healthcare executive in which they argued that a "Medicare Advantage For All" plan can "save" our healthcare system. In the column, Oz and his co-author articulated a plan to expand Medicare Advantage by imposing a 20% payroll tax.
Oz "is not a good pick for a very powerful position in charge of a trillion dollars of healthcare spending," wrote Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project on X, in reference to The Lever's investigation.
The Lever also reported that Oz's plan to expand private plans under Medicare Advantage could "boost companies in which he invests." For example, Oz and his wife owned up to $550,000 worth of stock in UnitedHealth Group, at the time of reporting. UnitedHealthcare and Humana account for nearly half, or 47%, of Medicare Advantage enrollees nationwide, according to the health policy organization KFF.
Additionally, a 2022 investigation by The New York Timesfound that major health insurers have exploited Medicare Advantage to boost their profits by billions of dollars.
Project 2025, a list of right-wing policy proposals led by the Heritage Foundation that Trump has tried to distance himself from, calls for making Medicare Advantage the default option for Medicare beneficiaries, which, if enacted, "would be a multibillion-dollar annual giveaway to corporations at the expense of Medicare enrollees and taxpayers," according to the liberal research and advocacy organization the Center for American Progress.
Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, offered a related critique of Oz: Americans "need someone who will crack down on insurers who want to deny care to the sick, providers who skimp on quality healthcare, corporations that want to privatize Medicare, and Big Pharma profiteers and ideologues who want to slash Medicaid and refuse care to low-income people. What they do not need is a healthcare huckster, which unfortunately Dr. Mehmet Oz appears to have become, having spent much of his recent career hawking products of dubious medical value."
In addition to the potential boon for private insurers, some researchers, news outlets, and members of Congress have also raised concerns about the quality of care administered under Medicare Advantage.
A 2022 government report found that "[Medicare Advantage Organizations] sometimes delayed or denied Medicare Advantage beneficiaries' access to services, even though the requests met Medicare coverage rules" and also "denied payments to providers for some services that met both Medicare coverage rules and [Medicare Advantage Organization] billing rules."
In October, a group of three Democratic lawmakers wrote to the current CMS administrator about increasingly widespread abuses and care denials by for-profit Medicare Advantage insurers.
"We are concerned that in many instances MA plans are failing to deliver, compromising timely access to care, and undermining the ability of seniors and Americans with disabilities to purchase the coverage that’s right for them," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), and Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.) wrote in a letter.
"We continue to hear alarming reports from seniors and their families, beneficiary advocates, and healthcare providers that MA plans are falling short, and finding a good plan is too difficult," they wrote.
In particular, they pointed to Medicare Advantage plans' growing reliance on prior authorization, a complex, barrier-ridden process whereby doctors must demonstrate a proposed treatment is medically necessary before the insurer will cover it.
"Overuse of prior authorization is not only harmful to patients, it hinders healthcare providers' ability to offer best-in-class service," they added.
Social Security Works, a progressive advocacy group, warned in a social media post Tuesday that "Dr. Oz wants to fully privatize Medicare."
"That's why Donald Trump put him in charge of Medicare," the group added. "We will fight to stop this charlatan from getting anywhere near our Medicare system."
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Milei's Argentina Offers Terrifying Glimpse of Trump's Project 2025
Elon Musk has already told you what Trump has planned will cause "temporary hardship." Argentinians living under their new libertarian masters can tell already you already what that pain and suffering feels like.
Nov 07, 2024
As the world absorbs the shockwave of Donald Trump’s win in the US presidential election, the playbook for his second term, designed by a handful of right-wing extremists, is already underway in Argentina.
Project 2025 is set out in a nearly 900-page ‘Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,’ produced by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing U.S. think tank, as a ready reckoner for the incoming Trump administration. It details authoritarian tactics that exist in various parts of the world, from attacking public education to dismantling policies to tackle climate change to restricting the rights of women, LGBTIQ+ people, migrants, workers and Black people. But if there is one country already trying some of Project 2025’s most extreme policies to weaken the state and render the enjoyment of rights obsolete, it is Argentina.
“If you have any doubts about how Project 2025 would be implemented, you have to look at what has happened in the last year in Argentina,” human rights lawyer Paula Ávila-Guillén, told me in a thought-provoking interview. She is the executive director of the Women's Equality Center (WEC) which works on communication strategies on reproductive health and justice in Latin America.
I knew what was happening in my country Argentina. A 30% cut in state spending and an eleven percentage point increase in poverty in less than a year don’t go unnoticed – even if you don't live there. Nor do the struggles that family and friends go through in a society already used to economic crashes. Still, Ávila-Guillén’s provocation prompted me to delve into the way Project 2025 is being carried out back home.
When Milei took office, he warned the Argentine people that their economic plight might briefly worsen under his harsh measures. This is exactly what millions are now suffering: more poverty and recession.
Project 2025 has been spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, but includes an advisory board with more than one hundred other Christian right and far right groups and dozens of former Trump officials.
“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration,” the Heritage Foundation says on its website to introduce Project 2025.
In the months leading up to election day, as Project 2025’s authoritarian goals were increasingly documented by the press, hate watch groups and trade unions, Trump tried to distance himself from it.
Javier Milei, president of Argentina since December last year and an emerging figurehead of the global far right, has never mentioned Project 2025. But he had been looking to establish ties with the Heritage Foundation since at least 2023, according to documents submitted by a lobbyist to the U.S. Department of Justice.
And a copy of the ‘Mandate for Leadership’ was handed to Milei by Heritage’s executive vice-president Derrick Morgan when the two met in Washington in February for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), according to Argentina’s government website which lists gifts received by the president.
A central goal of Project 2025 is to “dismantle the administrative state” allegedly co-opted by the left or wokism. It entails disbanding federal ministries and agencies, cutting public funding for health, education and welfare, and eliminating programs and resources to combat gender-based violence, discrimination, pollution and climate change.
If there is one country already trying some of Project 2025’s most extreme policies to weaken the state and render the enjoyment of rights obsolete, it is Argentina.
Milei has worked fast in his first ten months in power and has followed this script entirely. The argument for many of his new measures has been the need to lower public spending to balance a lopsided economy, with an annual inflation at 211% and a huge debt owed to the International Monetary Fund. There is nothing wrong with cutting superfluous spending of course, but Milei has gone so much further than anyone might have initially imagined, in what many have dubbed his “chainsaw-style approach” to reducing the size of the state.
“I love being the mole inside the state,”I Milei said in an interview in June. “I'm the one destroying the state from within”.
“I love being the mole inside the state. I'm the one destroying the state from within”
Milei
Milei has made an unprecedented cut to all public spending at close to 30%. He cut investment in education by 40%, denied increases to pensions, cut access to life-saving drugs for cancer patients, defunded the science and technology system and universities, and laid off almost 27,000 public employees.
He closed the public media and froze food distribution to soup kitchens. Now, he’s set to sell-off public companies in the fields of nuclear energy, aviation, fuel, mining, electricity, water, cargo transport, roads and railways.
Milei has eliminated nine ministries, including the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity and the Ministry of Education— something that the Mandate for Leadership mentions and Trump has also spoken about.
He has dismantled all gender policies and defunded services including those for survivors of domestic and sexual violence. Last year, more than 170,000 people accessed these services, while official figures show that a femicide is committed every 35 hours in Argentina. It is now unclear whether anyone will continue to keep track of these statistics.
He also closed the Institute against Discrimination, Racism and Xenophobia, which he called a “sinister body used for ideological persecution.” Project 2025 authors would no doubt be delighted. Their blueprint for Trump goes to great lengths to explain how every diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policy, program and fund must be removed.
The ‘Mandate for Leadership’ details the need to assemble an army of loyalists from day one to carry out this task of reducing the state. The Heritage Foundation has a database of some 20,000 people in the U.S. who would make up a transitional staff for Trump. But it would require firing tens of thousands of career civil servants to replace them with people loyal to their ideology and ban public employees’ right to unionise.
Milei is actively persecuting civil servants who don’t follow his mindset. In a letter to the diplomatic corps, he demanded those who don’t align with his foreign policy ideas to “step aside,” specifically referencing his plan to repudiate the UN's Agenda 2030 which governments have signed to combat poverty, inequality and environmental destruction.
Days later, in a statement, he announced a purge: “The executive branch will launch an audit of the career staff of the foreign ministry with the aim of identifying promoters of anti-freedom ideas.”
War on gender
According to Project 2025, the next US president must “remove from every existing rule, regulatory agency, contract, grant, regulation, and federal law the terms sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity, and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights.”
Abortion is mentioned 199 times in the document, including proposing a federal ban, increased criminalization, more restrictions on providing care for miscarriages and obstetric emergencies, defunding emergency contraception and strict surveillance systems on people who have abortions or suffer miscarriages.
Heritage also wants to impose its worldview across borders: restore the so-called ‘Mexico City policy,’ which prohibits any U.S. public funding to foreign non-governmental organizations if they include any abortion-related activity—even if they do so with their own funds.
The right to abortion, legalized in 2021 in Argentina, is in danger under Milei. His party introduced a bill to repeal abortion which he’s referred to as “aggravated murder.” He’s also defunded the distribution of abortion pills and contraceptives.
Milei eliminated a program to prevent teenage pregnancy and has not set aside any funds in the 2025 budget for comprehensive sex education—which is mandatory by law and considered essential to prevent child abuse. Instead, authorities hired the Chilean Catholic organization Teen Star, that promotes abstinence, for training teachers in charge of CSE.
Milei banned the use of gender inclusive language in public services, and put a Catholic lawyer, Ursula Basset, in the foreign ministry to review all the country's positions on gender and climate change. At the last Organization of American States (OAS) General Assembly, Basset stymied the negotiations by demanding the removal of “LGBTI people,” “gender,” “tolerance,” “climate change,” and “families” from agreed intergovernmental statements.
“Argentina was the only G20 country to oppose the Ministerial Declaration on Gender Equality,” signed last month in Rio, Ávila-Guillén told me. The disagreement stemmed from the fact that “family care” was defined as work and the term “reproductive rights” was mentioned. Argentina ended up in a more extreme position than Saudi Arabia or Russia.
“At the G20 meeting, Argentina ended up in a more extreme position on gender than Saudi Arabia or Russia”
Respectability and academic tone is just a veneer for hate in Mandate for Leadership. You only need to skim the document to find polarizing language and the construction of an internal enemy. Milei likewise calls his opponents “rats,” “human excrement,” “fucking lefties,” “imbeciles,” or “traitors.”
“The idea that Milei is the most Argentinian thing that could happen to Argentina is ridiculous; he is part of a much bigger agenda, crafted in the U.S. and which is trying to be implemented in different parts of the world,” Ávila-Guillén says.
The lobbyist that connected Milei with the Heritage Foundation last year is Damián Merlo, partner director of Latin America Advisory Group, a company which lobbies in the U.S. on behalf of authoritarian Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele. Merlo is close to digital strategist Fernando Cerimedo, who also works for Milei and has done so for the former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. Cerimedo is currently under investigation in Brazil for his alleged role in the 2022 failed coup attempt led by Bolsonaro against Brazilian president Inácio Lula da Silva.
When Milei took office, he warned the Argentine people that their economic plight might briefly worsen under his harsh measures. This is exactly what millions are now suffering: more poverty and recession.
In the last days of the U.S. election campaign, a similar message was spread by billionaire Elon Musk who put more than $100 million into Trump's campaign, and who would be, according to Trump, his “secretary of cost-cutting.” Such cuts, Musk warned, might cause “temporary hardship,” but they were necessary in the path to “long-term prosperity.”
Prosperity for whom is not clear—but a recipe for hardship, denial of rights and persecution is on display in Argentina, if you can bear to take a look.
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Voting Isn't Optional: Defend Our Democracy Against Project 2025’s Assault
If Trump wins and this far-right agenda is to put into motion, it will wreak havoc on Black communities in a way we haven’t seen since Jim Crow.
Nov 04, 2024
We are one day away from the election, and too much is at stake for Black people. The questioning around Vice President Kamala Harris' Blackness and misconceptions about her plans for Black people continue to distract voters from the far-right, destructive manifesto fueling Donald Trump’s agenda, Project 2025: a dangerous declaration of oppression that risks civil rights and the democratic fabric of our nation.
Project 2025 details a disturbing vision for the future of Black people in this country: One where we have no rights, no control of our bodies, none where we can’t afford groceries, we can’t afford housing, where our children can’t even learn their own history because it is erased and whitewashed, and where politicians can spread dangerous lies about Black people without recourse. This manifesto seeks to erode the authority of vital government agencies, giving unprecedented power to the executive branch, leaving so many Black communities devastated. By threatening discrimination laws and targeting initiatives promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, Project 2025 will unravel decades of hard-fought civil rights progress.And with little to no federal oversight historical patterns of discrimination against Black communities will also worsen.
Black communities know what it’s like to be at the hands of a government without checks and balances and no accountability.
One of the key civil rights standards Project 2025 seeks to eliminate critical safeguard that addresses unintentional discriminatory practices, is a backbone of civil rights protections. This is the disparate impact standard in discrimination cases. In 2013, in one of the largest fair lending cases in the DOJ’s history, Black customers in the Chicago area brought a large lawsuit against Wells Fargo after they paid $2,937 more in broker fees for their homes than similarly situated white customers. Without the disparate impact standard, the federal government would have been unable to demonstrate that Black communities had suffered disproportionate harm at the hands of Wells Fargo. At a time when the nation is grappling with a housing crisis, eliminating the disparate impact standard would exacerbate existing disparities and leave Black communities vulnerable to discriminatory housing and lending practices.
Project 2025 also seeks to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in our schools and businesses. In June, a U.S. federal court of appeals court deemed an Atlanta private equity fund unconstitutional for providing grants to women-owned and Black-owned companies, ignoring the systemic barriers that have historically excluded Black women from investment funding. And following the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, conservatives attacked critical programs designed to increase the number of Black medical doctors. In a world where Black mothers are dying more than anyone in childbirth, the need for Black doctors is needed more than ever. The Project 2025 manifesto seeks to take this further and delete all references to diversity, equity, and inclusion from in our federal regulations and legislation. But let’s be very clear about what this will mean: these efforts will sabotage contracts, harm Black-owned businesses, and perpetuate historical injustices within Black communities.
Project 2025's agenda will wreak havoc on Black communities in a way we haven’t seen since Jim Crow. Black communities know what it’s like to be at the hands of a government without checks and balances and no accountability. As we are one day out from the election, Black people must vote in mass. We must recognize the urgency of this threat to our democracy and lean on tangible solutions to defend our rights for many generations. It’s time to take back our power, and let our voices be heard. Vote like your life depends on it because it does. We need all hands on deck to protect our future.
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