Just Ahead Of Midterms, Trump Raises $$$ Of Medicare Drugs. Say, Do Old People Vote?
They don't if he won't let them. Problem solved.
Just in time for the midterms, the Trump administration is rolling out yet another increase in healthcare costs for seniors, although the higher prices won’t hit until January.
As the Wall Street Journal reports (gift link), the latest kick in the teeth to older Americans will eliminate a subsidy that has held down subscribers’ monthly premium costs for Medicare Part D, the optional prescription drug plans used by about 25 million folks on Medicare. The subsidies, a result of Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, were supposed to run though 2027, but Trump will instead cut them off at the end of 2026.
Unless Congress votes to stop that, we added for the sake of hollow mordant laughter.
According to a Trump administration official who spoke to the Journal, some 45 percent of Part D subscribers will see a monthly premium increase between $11 and $20, which is kind of hefty considering that the average Part D premium is around $36 a month, per the healthcare policy boffins at KFF.
Another 30 percent will have an increase that’s “less than $10” a month, which is practically nothing for people on a fixed income. Just eat less avocado toast, Grammy. Oh, but the remaining 25 percent would see either no change or even a slight decrease in premium.
Incidentally, the Journal article listed those likely changes in reverse order, starting with the sliver of the Part D subscribers who wouldn’t be harmed. Funny, that.
Oh yes, and since the lower monthly premiums were achieved though about $3.6 billion in annual subsidies to the private insurance companies that provide Part D plans, the administration is pretending this is a huge win for Americans, because Trump is sticking it to Big Insurance. Way to go!
All at the low, low cost of higher premiums for 75 percent of the people on Medicare Part D. Woohoo. Surely the folks seeing their premiums go up by $240 a year will enjoy thinking about how those insurance-company leeches are suffering as a result.
Hey, remember when Trump said at a rally way back in 2017, “You will end up with great health care for a fraction of the price and that will take place immediately after we go in. Immediately! Fast! Quick!”
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Announcing the change, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz bragged on social media, “We are stabilizing the market so this bailout is no longer needed.” Every time a Trumper says this is eliminating a “corporate subsidy,” make sure you shout back that the costs will be borne by seniors who will now pay more for their prescriptions.
Also, let’s just take a moment to remind y’all that the whole idea for Medicare Part D was that the Magic of the Free Market would keep seniors’ medication costs down. Once private insurers got their sticky little fingers into the lucrative market for life-saving prescription drugs for folks on Medicare, they were supposed to compete to offer the very best plans. Whether Part D has actually managed to do that, though, is a big enough question that we’ll save it for another day.
One thing that’s quite clear, however, is that the subsidies really did result in lower premiums for Part D subscribers. (Yes, little libertarian screamers, those subsidies were paid for with taxes. We live in a society, fuck you.) Per the Journal:
The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, a federal watchdog agency, estimates the subsidy program, which was supposed to stabilize Part D, reduced the average Part D plan premium by about 40% in 2025. This year, it cut the average rate by an estimated 27%.
Next year, you’re going to have to hope that sticking it to the insurers won’t cost you too much.
In addition, the Journal points out that the higher Part D premiums are likely to “push more Medicare enrollees into Medicare Advantage, the private-insurer version of Medicare, which generally wrap in drug benefits and often charge no premiums at all.”
That might work out OK for those seniors or not (please tell us about your Medicare Advantage experiences in the comments, which we do not allow). But it isn’t likely to save taxpayers much of anything, because while Medicare Advantage can reduce out of pocket costs for most subscribers, it actually costs the federal government more per person covered than regular Medicare.
Perhaps we could improve society somewhat by dispensing altogether with the kludgy mix of privatized profits and socialized costs in our current hodgepodge of a “system.” What about expanding and improving regular Medicare to cover all Americans, with European-style limits on what providers charge, so everyone gets medical care at a reasonable cost. But that would be communism, like the happy, healthy people in Scandinavian social democracies must endure.
To avoid that horror, we suppose we’ll need big cuts to Medicare next.
[WSJ (gift link) / ABC News / Center for Medicare Advocacy]
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(updated final paragraph to make clear that I'm not really objecting to Medicare Advantage plans costing the government more; rather, just saying that we could almost certainly make the whole system better by not having for-profit healthcare at all. Hope that's clarified by my tweaks)
Q: Do Old People Vote?
A: Yes, we do; and we will; and MANY of us know exactly who we are voting for (any and all progressive Ds, and where not progressive, D's anyway) and exactly who we are voting against (any and all Rs, at every level).