Vol. 74/No. 48      December 20, 2010

Most workers and farmers in the United States depend on Medicare for health care following retirement. Won as a by-product of the fight for unions and the Black rights battles of the 1950s and ’60s, it provides basic medical care to anyone over the age of 65 and those who are disabled.

Because of how it was won, working people consider Medicare their right. The capitalists are reluctant to go after it with a frontal assault. Rather, they chip away on numerous fronts, one of them by reducing payments to doctors who treat Medicare patients.

The House of Representatives voted November 29 to put off for another month a scheduled 23 percent drop in fees for doctors treating patients on Medicare. Ten times in the last eight years, and four times this year, Congress has voted not to make the cut.

But doctors are already dropping thousands who depend on Medicare in favor of those who pay higher fees, either through private insurance plans or out of pocket. Highline Medical Group, with 35 doctors at eight clinics in the Seattle area, told 6,000 Medicare patients they must switch to a different Medicare plan by January 1 because of the anticipated fee drop.

A survey by the Washington State Medical Association found that 22 percent of doctors would stop taking new Medicare patients if the cut goes through.

The New England Journal of Medicine reported that more than half of the $938 billion the new health-care reform law will supposedly devote to coverage for low-income people will come from cuts to Medicare—$455 billion over 10 years.

One of the targets of these cuts is Medicare Advantage, a private insurance program that contracts with the federal government. The advantage program is used by 25 percent of Medicare patients, in part because it includes drug prescription coverage, which basic Medicare does not.

When Secure Horizons HMO of Santa Cruz, California, stops offering Medicare Advantage in 2011, 2,000 patients have only one other Medicare option in the county, Healthy Heart. Their monthly premiums will rise from $85 to $181 and copayments for doctor visits will also increase.

Another means of gradually undermining Medicare is through government sleight of hand in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Based on the government’s current index, Social Security recipients were denied a cost-of-living increase this year and for 2011 because inflation supposedly held steady. Not only does this CPI not count rises in food or fuel prices, it ignores the fact that older people spend twice as much on health care as those who are younger.

Now Obama’s deficit commission is proposing a new CPI scheme for determining Social Security that will downplay inflation even more.
 
 
Related articles:
Grinding joblessness confronts millions in the United States
Commission calls for working-class ‘sacrifice’
‘The rulers must radically lower expectations’  
 
 
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