LABOR Medicare Advantage Is Such a Threat to Workers, They Wrote a Paper on It -- PortSide

[erronis]

https://portside.org/2025-07-16/medicare-advantage-such-threat-workers-they-wrote-paper-it

What Medicare Advantage is, the white paper goes on to say is “another Wall Street privatization scheme of raiding public funds for private profit much like the attacks on public schools, water systems, and even parking meters."

This past April, labor advocates for single payer health care published a white paper called, “Medicare Advantage: What Labor Leaders Need to Know.”

In it, the authors remind labor leaders—including those in New York City who spent the last four years trying to push 250,000 municipal retirees into Medicare Advantage—that Medicare Advantage is “neither Medicare (the public, universal program without intermediaries between patients and the healthcare they need), nor is it an Advantage, except to profit-driven insurance companies.”

What Medicare Advantage is, the white paper goes on to say is “another Wall Street privatization scheme of raiding public funds for private profit much like the attacks on public schools, water systems, and even parking meters. With support from both the Democratic and Republican parties, Medicare is just the latest target, and the privatization is happening rapidly.”

. . .

You can read the full report from the Labor Campaign for Single Payer Health Care and the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute here. Work-Bites has made repeated requests to District Council 37 Executive Director Henry Garrido to find out if he read it, too—but we’ve yet to get a response.

. . .

A good presentation on the plans of this administration to start to force real Medicare through the "prior authorization" process also.

[SickOfTheOnePct]

1. If the goal...

...is to get to universal, government-paid healthcare, people are going to have to get used to the idea of prior authorization for high-cost procedures and drugs. I don't see any universal healthcare scenario where doctors can order any kind of treatment or any kind of drug, regardless of cost or efficacy, without some type of pre-approval.

[Silent Type]

2. +1. Don't think people realize how often doctors order stuff they profit from that has questionable medical value.

[SickOfTheOnePct]

3. Exactly

And under a universal, government-paid healthcare system, there will be a budget, which by definition limits total annual funding (even if the limit is high). Such a system is not going to just pay for everything a doctor orders without some level of pre-approval, especially for very expensive procedures near end of life.