Rally to Stop the Corporate Takeover of Medicare
Sunday, March 20
2 PM to 3:30 PM
In front of Elting Library
93 Main Street, New Paltz
Help Stop The Biggest Threat To Medicare You’ve Never Even Heard Of!
Millions of seniors and Medicare beneficiaries are quietly being enrolled into a
pilot program called Realizing Equity Access in Community Health (R.E.A.C.H.),
run by the Dept. of Health and Human Services, which contracts with third-party middlemen.
This is occurring without our full knowledge or consent. If left unchecked, the R.E.A.C.H.
program could radically transform traditional Medicare within a few years, without input
from us and without any Congressional oversight.
The Medicare R.E.A.C.H. program allows commercial insurers and other for-profit companies to
“manage” care for seniors enrolled in traditional (fee-for-service) Medicare.
Instead of paying doctors and hospitals directly for seniors’ care, Medicare gives these middlemen a monthly payment to cover a defined portion of each senior’s medical expenses. R.E.A.C.H. investor entities are then allowed to keep what they don’t pay for in health services, a dangerous financial incentive to restrict and ration seniors’ care. While traditional Medicare requires 98% of its budget to be spent on patient care, R.E.A.C.H. requires only 60%, thereby allowing up to 40% of their budget for their own profit and overhead.
Dr. Susan Rogers, a retired internal medicine doctor and president of the 24,000-member Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) said, “This establishes a dangerous incentive to ration and restrict seniors’ care, if left unchecked, R.E.A.C.H. will hand traditional Medicare to Wall Street investors, without input from seniors, doctors, or even Congress.”
Medicare must remain a reliable public benefit that offers the highest quality of care to people across the U.S.
Join this important rally to urge Pres. Biden to end this grab of our Medicare dollars immediately. The rally will include a brief march and some speakers.