The Biden-Harris administration has been criticized for pouring billions of taxpayer dollars into bailing out health insurers in an effort to hide impending price hikes for Medicare Part D plans with less than 100 days until Election Day.
The Democrat-backed Inflation Control Act of 2022 (IRA) would limit Medicare beneficiaries’ out-of-pocket drug costs, resulting in insurance companies Dramatically hiking The monthly premium would be $100, Breitbart News reported.
The average bid for a Part D plan is triple That could happen by 2025, according to a Fox News analysis.
As these concerns reach older voters, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a federal agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has developed a three-year plan. “Demonstration Project” To subsidize skyrocketing insurance premiums.
The Biden-Harris administration is aiming to keep Part D plans at artificially low costs, but some policy experts say taxpayers will end up footing the bill for the guise of relief.
“What will insurers do when plan costs rise? Of course they will raise premiums,” Jackson Hammond of Paragon Health Research wrote in an Aug. 5 report. Report.
“We don’t yet know how much Part D premiums will be,” the senior policy analyst said, “but we do know that premiums will jump, as the average bid submitted by stand-alone PDP plans has soared from $64.28 in 2024 to $179.45 in 2025. And roughly 25 percent of the increase will be paid by beneficiaries and 75 percent by taxpayers.”
Hammond said higher out-of-pocket limits could have prevented this from happening.
The original bipartisan redesign of Part D set a cost cap of $3,100, which was supposed to limit both premium increases and the burden on taxpayers. Former CBO director Doug Holtz-Eakin estimates that fewer than 3 percent of Medicare beneficiaries have out-of-pocket costs of more than $2,000. So under the partisan IRA, Part D premiums were significantly increased.
“CMS has not yet released a cost estimate, but a rough calculation puts the three-year cost of the pilot at well over $10 billion,” he added.
The institute’s report called CMS’s demonstration plans a “sham, costly demonstration.”
Joe Grogan, a former domestic policy adviser to President Donald Trump, also argued that the administration was simply shifting costs onto taxpayers to further increase the burden.
“They’ve destroyed Part D premiums,” Grogan told Fox News. “I don’t know if it would stand up to legal scrutiny if someone sues. Objectively, this shouldn’t be done. They’re just withholding $5 billion to $10 billion of taxpayer money, with taxpayers paying the cost 85 days before an election. It’s disgusting.”
“It’s going to get even worse in 2025, 2026,” Grogan added. “The program is in a death spiral. They announced a three-year demo, and it’s already failed. The demo is going to fail. Premiums are still going to go up.”
About 67.3 million Americans were enrolled in Medicare as of April, about 80% of whom were covered by Part D, according to CMS.
“They just want to get through the election,” Grogan said. “They’re hopeful they’ll be able to confront it after the election, but they’ll have to deal with it over the next 12 to 18 months. They didn’t expect it to get this bad, and it’s only going to get worse.”
