Tag Archives: Senior Citizens

The ‘Unintended’ Consequences Of The Inflation Reduction Act

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One of the major unintended consequences (at least I think it was unintended) of the Inflation Reduction Act is the impact it will have on America’s senior citizens. While the AARP and the Biden/Harris administration are touting the agreement to cut the cost of some drugs, they are failing to mention that the cost of Medicare and its drug programs is going to skyrocket in the coming year.

On Saturday, Breitbart posted an article about President Trump’s plans to combat inflation. You might have noticed that the Inflation Reduction Act has not successfully done that.

The article reports:

Bidenflation has ravaged seniors over the past four years, putting immense financial pressure on those living on fixed incomes. As a result, many seniors in swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are turning away from the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration and shifting their support to Donald Trump, who has made clear promises to fix inflation and lower healthcare costs.

Inflation is wreaking havoc on seniors, but the Biden-Harris response has been woefully negligent. Their solution was the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). They promised seniors that prices would come down if it passed. They even got AARP to spend $60 million to convince the swamp to support it. They rammed it through Congress with Harris’ tie-breaking vote delivering it to Joe Biden to sign into law. However, the IRA did nothing to ease seniors’ financial suffering. Instead, the IRA stole hundreds of billions from Medicare to subsidize electric vehicles, benefiting the Chinese manufacturers and their overlords in the Chinese Communist Party. The IRA was never about lowering costs for seniors. It was a left-wing fever dream full of big green subsidies and socialized medicine come to life.

So, seniors’ bills got even bigger. The IRA caused a massive spike in Medicare premiums. Thanks to Biden and Harris, seniors faced a staggering 20 percent increase this year, with projections indicating an additional 50 percent increase next year—or potentially even higher. This is not just an inconvenience; it’s a devastating hit to the budgets of millions of elderly Americans.

Unfortunately, the IRA wasn’t done there. It also repealed the Trump Rebate Rule, a critical safeguard designed to save seniors billions by lowering their out-of-pocket costs and curbing the greed of Big Insurance pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). By removing these protections, Biden and Harris have left seniors more vulnerable than ever to insurance companies overcharging them for prescription drug prices.

The IRA also corrupted the popular Medicare Part D. No longer a market-driven program to deliver affordable drugs to seniors, the IRA is trying to turn a successful program into a bureaucratic nightmare with price controls imposed by Washington, creating a new $3 billion bureaucracy that makes medicine less accessible for seniors. This isn’t just about rising premiums; it’s about government interference in patients’ access to essential medications.

Vote blue if you want grandma and grandpa to move in with you because they can no longer afford to live on their own!

 

We Need To Learn From The Mistakes Made In New York

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New York has had a very high percentage of deaths from the coronavirus compared to  other states in the nation. This is not by chance–it is the result of bad decisions made at the beginning of the pandemic and throughout the crisis. Yesterday The National Review posted an article detailing the decisions that exacerbated the outbreak.

The article reports:

Cuomo made three breathtakingly bad moves in March that in retrospect amounted to catastrophe. First, Cuomo failed to call for, and even actively discouraged, informal social-distancing measures in early March. Next was the delay in mid-March in ordering formal closures when the virus started rampaging through his state. Third was his March 25 edict to long-term care facilities that they must accept infected patients, which caused a mass deadly outbreak among helpless, trapped, elderly New Yorkers.

The article notes:

Like de Blasio, who as late as March 10 was on MSNBC telling New Yorkers that most of us were at little to no risk and that the coronavirus was much like seasonal flu, Cuomo persisted with his don’t-scare-away-the-tourists happy talk well into March, the critical month. On March 1, the day New York State logged its first confirmed case of the coronavirus (a health-care worker who had just returned from Iran), Cuomo assured everyone that, although one of his own daughters had called him in a state of panic, there was no need to be afraid. “The facts defeat fear. Because the reality is reassuring. It is deep breath time. . . . This is not our first rodeo with this type of situation in New York,” Cuomo boasted, adding, “Excuse our arrogance as New Yorkers,” but the state was fully prepared. “We don’t even think it’s going to be as bad as it was in other countries,” he said. “We’re going to have a special effort for our nursing homes, et cetera, congregate facilities where senior citizens are being treated.” He further boasted that the state had broken free of federal restraints about testing: “Now we are actually in control of the systems ourselves. And as New Yorkers we like control.”

Summing up, Cuomo said, “Once you know the facts, once you know the reality, it is reassuring and we should relax because that’s what’s dictated by the reality of the situation.”

On March 6 Cuomo insisted, “The overall risk level of the novel coronavirus in New York remains low” and said, “We have more people in this country dying from the flu than we have dying from coronavirus.” As late as March 8, Cuomo, instead of advising people to stay away from the subway, advised New Yorkers to seek out less-crowded subway cars, the mass-transit equivalent of saying, “Let them eat cake.”

The coronavirus was an unknown entity, and I don’t blame Governor Cuomo for his original missteps.  However, I do believe that Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio were slow to acknowledge and react to the danger. Contrast this with President Trump who had the foresight to stop air travel from China. Leadership matters.

How Red Flag Laws Can Be Misused

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The American Thinker posted an article today about a move during the Obama administration to deny gun rights to veterans and senior citizens.

The article reports:

The Obama administration’s idea of keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill was based on a bizarre and discriminatory definition of who might be mentally unstable. In 2013 it was reported that the Veterans Administration was sending letters to vets warning them that they might be declared mentally incompetent and denied their Second Amendment rights unless they could prove otherwise:

The contempt by the Obama administration for our Constitution and our rights has reached a new low with news the Veterans Administration has begun sending letters to veterans telling them they will be declared mentally incompetent and stripped of the Second Amendment rights unless they can prove to unnamed bureaucrats to the contrary…

“A determination of incompetency will prohibit you from purchasing, possessing, receiving, or transporting a firearm or ammunition. If you knowingly violate any of these prohibitions, you may be fined, imprisoned, or both pursuant to the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, Pub.L.No. 103-159, as implemented at 18, United States Code 924(a)(2),” the letter reads…

While mental health is a factor in the current gun control debate and recent mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., and elsewhere have in common the questionable mental state of the shooters, to single out returning vets from Iraq and Afghanistan this way is unconscionable and unconstitutional.

As the Los Angeles Times has reported, the Obama administration would have liked like to make our Social Security records part of the background check system. The move would have stripped some four million Americans who receive payments though a “representative payee” of their gun rights. It would be the largest gun grab in U.S. history.

A potentially large group within Social Security are people who, in the language of federal gun laws, are unable to manage their own affairs due to “marked subnormal intelligence, or mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease.”

There is no simple way to identify that group, but a strategy used by the Department of Veterans Affairs since the creation of the background check system is reporting anyone who has been declared incompetent to manage pension or disability payments and assigned a fiduciary.

The article concludes:

Keeping guns out of the hands of the truly mentally unstable is a worthy goal, but it should not be used as a cause for disarming veterans who carried a weapon in defense of their country or seniors who might need some assistance in paying their bills.

They deserve the presumption of innocence, and sanity, every bit as much as Vester Flanagan. Stripping away their Second Amendment rights in the name of mental health would be a gross injustice that would not make us safer, but would merely create millions of unarmed victims for the next shooter with an agenda.

We need to make sure that American citizens understand our Constitution and Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights is there to limit the rights of government–not the rights of citizens. If we want to preserve our republic, we have to continue to fight to protect those rights our Founding Fathers codified in the Constitution and The Bill of Rights.

Getting Old In American Just Got Worse

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Generally speaking, American senior citizens get reasonable medical care. Medicare takes care of joint replacements, cataracts, and other senior-related ailments. However, that is about to change.

Yesterday The New York Post posted an article discussing changes President Obama is about to make to Medicare. The changes President Obama is suggesting will impact the quality of life that American senior citizens now enjoy.

The article reports:

The president’s Medicare reforms make it harder for seniors to get joint replacements. His new payment rules shortchange doctors, discouraging them from accepting Medicare in the first place. New ER rules clobber seniors with bills for “observation care.” Under ObamaCare, hospitals get bonuses for spending less per senior, despite having higher death rates and infection rates.

Expect the Medicare Trustees’ annual report, due out Wednesday, to ignore these problems.

…The new rules also make seeing Medicare patients a money loser. Annual fee increases for doctors are capped at a fraction of one percent — even though rents and other costs go up every year.

No wonder nine out of 10 solo practitioners admit they’ll avoid Medicare patients — right when 10,000 new baby boomers are joining each day.

Obama’s rules spell trouble for seniors with cancer. Doctors administering chemotherapy are getting a pay cut and being prodded to choose the cheapest drug, regardless of which medication is best for their patient. Dr. Debra Patt warned Congress this’ll hinder access to drugs like the immunotherapy that subdued former President Jimmy Carter’s cancer.

Another Obama rule penalizes hospitals for doing hip and knee replacements on patients likely to need rehab after surgery, causing hospitals to shun older patients with complex conditions. Grandma will have to settle for the painkiller as candidate Obama notoriously suggested.

…Clinton proposes opening Medicare to people in their 50s. That would force seniors to compete with younger patients for resources — like in Britain and Canada, where seniors are labeled “bed blockers,” and certain treatments are reserved for younger patients with more life ahead.

When ObamaCare was first enacted, there were discussions about denying care to senior citizens–we all remember Sarah Palin‘s claim that ‘death panels’ were built into ObamaCare (which actually turned out to be true). My real question in all of this is whether or not the politicians who are going along with these ‘reforms’ are going to have to live under them.