07/30/2026
Medicare and Medicaid exist for one simple reason: so people can get the care their doctor says they need, without being pushed into bankruptcy to do it.
Under the Trump administration, that promise is getting chipped away again. Next year, people on Medicare will pay more out of pocket for their prescription drug coverage after the administration ended a subsidy that had been keeping those costs down.
At the same time, a pilot program is now requiring prior authorization for certain Medicare services — and giving private companies a financial bonus for every request they deny. Congress has already seen the problems with this firsthand: Democrats pushed to repeal it after reports showed it was relying on deeply flawed AI to reject care that patients genuinely needed. Republicans in the Senate voted to keep the program running anyway.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. It's part of a longer push to hand more of Medicare over to private, for-profit companies — the same companies whose "Medicare Advantage" plans have already overbilled American taxpayers by more than $50 billion.
Medicare works because it puts patients and doctors in charge of care decisions, not insurance company profit margins. That's worth protecting, and worth calling out every time it's put at risk.
