What I'm reading ...
... as we head toward a fateful election day.
The HHS Office of the Inspector General issued a report today confirming what whistleblowers, former CMS officials, the Medicare Payments Advisory Commission and numerous press accounts have documented for a decade: Medicare Advantage insurers are ripping off taxpayers and the government. See: Medicare Advantage: Questionable Use of Health Risk Assessments Continues To Drive Up Payments to Plans by Billions.
Jon Cohn at HuffPost worries about the fate of Medicaid under Trump: This Essential Health Care Program Could Get Hammered If Donald Trump Wins.
Noam N. Levey at KFF Health News on why Voters Fret High Medical Bills Are Being Ignored by Presidential Rivals.
Research published in Health Affairs this week shows most people forced off Medicaid with the end of the Covid emergency either found new coverage in an employer-sponsored plan or purchased individual/family plans sold on the Obamacare exchanges. See: Resumption Of Medicaid Eligibility Redeterminations: Little Change In Overall Insurance Coverage.
And for a historian’s take on the triumph of fascism in Germany and its relevance to the coming election, I highly recommend Hitler’s Enablers by UNC/Chapel Hill’s Christopher R. Browning in the latest New York Review of Books. The subtitle: “The complicity of conservative nationalists in the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933 offers disturbing parallels to the current American political situation.”
More on what the election will mean for health care in my weekend GoozNews post.
