Trump Administration is Ending Premium Subsidies for Medicare Part D Drug Plans

Senior citizens will pay the price for this with their lives

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

This one hits close to home because I am on Medicare. The Trump administration is ending subsidies for premiums of Medicare Part D drug plans. They claim its because they have negotiated such great prices for drugs that the subsidies are no longer needed. In fact, they claim that even without the subsidies, premiums will go down.

All of which is patently false. The reason why Trump wants to get rid of the Medicare Part D premium subsidies is because they are a leftover from the Biden administration and Trump, as we all know, is on a mission to get rid of all vestiges of the both the Obama and Biden administrations.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services claims that the most any premiums would rise is $10. Experts who live in the real world, say that premiums will rise by hundreds of dollars.

The reason why this is concerning is that through the miracle of modern medicine, many seniors are enjoying longer, healthier lives in their own homes rather than spending the last years of their lives very ill and confined to hospitals and nursing homes.

What is that miracle? Drugs. Doctors can now treat many common conditions that occur during the aging process on an outpatient basis using drugs. There’s a downside also. Older people often have multiple specialists prescribing multiple drugs and that can lead to all sorts of negative interactions or even being overmedicated.

But when all goes well, those drugs can keep people healthy, enjoying life and living in their own homes. The problem with this is that those drugs are expensive. People need help paying for them through their insurance and they need their insurance premiums to be low.

Otherwise, they ration the drugs or don’t take them at all because they can’t afford them. Those patients end up in emergency rooms, nursing homes or dead. All of which can be averted when the government subsidizes insurance premiums. Those susidies are much, much cheaper than treating extremely ill patients who are unable to afford the medications that they need.

Luckily for Democrats, seniors will become aware of the drastic rise in their premiums at the same time that they are voting in the midterms. That’s because every year in the fall, seniors can review their current insurance plans and shop for new, cheaper plans to start in January.

Republicans are having a meltdown over this. The MAGA base skews older and poorer, the exact people who will be most affected by this latest insane Trump policy change. Democrats should be celebrating. The ads just write themselves.

The biggest losers in this farce are the elderly. Without those subsidies, many will lead much shorter lives and be much sicker.