Dr. Oz Had Up to Tens of Millions Invested in Companies Involved With CMS

from Common Dreams

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the "former daytime television fixture" who U.S. President-elect Donald Trump picked to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, reported "up to $56 million in investments in three companies" with direct CMS interests, the watchdog Accountable.US highlighted Friday.

The celebrity heart surgeon is already under fire for his record of peddling "baseless or wrong" health advice and pushing Medicare Advantage (MA)—an alternative to the government-run program administered by private health insurance companies—on The Dr. Oz Show, as well as his stake in UnitedHealth and CVS Health.

The new Accountable.US report—based on disclosures from Oz's unsuccessful 2022 run against U.S. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.)—adds to conflict of interest concerns and fears that Oz may thwart the Biden administration's new rule intended to rein in privatized Medicare Advantage plans...

read more here

Privatize! Privatize! Privatize! Trump Picks Dr. Oz to Privatize Medicare and Medicaid

by Scott Creighton

Donald Trump has picked TV celebrity Dr. Oz to head up the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in spite of the fact that he 1. has no experience running such a large agency of any kind and 2. he was recently busted shilling a fake weight loss program to his fans.

Of course, to Dr. Oz, that means TIME TO PRIVATIZE those effective programs so BIG BUSINESS can make some glorious money!

'Dr. Oz has weighed in on Medicare policy, helping to write a 2020 opinion column in Forbes arguing for a universal health coverage system, in which every American not covered by Medicaid would be enrolled in a private Medicare Advantage plan. The coverage expansion, the column said, would be financed by an “affordable 20 percent payroll tax,” and would eliminate employer health coverage and the government Medicare program.

That strategy would be far out of the mainstream of conservative health policy. In 2019, Vice President Kamala Harris, then a candidate for president, proposed a version of a “Medicare for all” plan with similarities to Dr. Oz’s 2020 idea. Instead of replacing private coverage with a government-run system, as some of her Democratic rivals had done, Ms. Harris called for allowing people to choose between a government Medicare program and plans modeled on Medicare Advantage.' NYT

Finally Medicare Advantage is Being Exposed

And it's about damn time. 

Projected costs of single-payer healthcare financing in the United States: A systematic review of economic analyses

from PLOS

The United States is the only high-income nation without universal, government-funded or -mandated health insurance employing a unified payment system. The US multi-payer system leaves residents uninsured or underinsured, despite overall healthcare costs far above other nations. Single-payer (often referred to as Medicare for All), a proposed policy solution since 1990, is receiving renewed press attention and popular support. Our review seeks to assess the projected cost impact of a single-payer approach.

Methods and findings

We conducted our literature search between June 1 and December 31, 2018, without start date restriction for included studies. We surveyed an expert panel and searched PubMed, Google, Google Scholar, and preexisting lists for formal economic studies of the projected costs of single-payer plans for the US or for individual states. Reviewer pairs extracted data on methods and findings using a template. We quantified changes in total costs standardized to percentage of contemporaneous healthcare spending. Additionally, we quantified cost changes by subtype, such as costs due to increased healthcare utilization and savings due to simplified payment administration, lower drug costs, and other factors. We further examined how modeling assumptions affected results. Our search yielded economic analyses of the cost of 22 single-payer plans over the past 30 years. Exclusions were due to inadequate technical data or assuming a substantial ongoing role for private insurers. We found that 19 (86%) of the analyses predicted net savings (median net result was a savings of 3.46% of total costs) in the first year of program operation and 20 (91%) predicted savings over several years; anticipated growth rates would result in long-term net savings for all plans. The largest source of savings was simplified payment administration (median 8.8%), and the best predictors of net savings were the magnitude of utilization increase, and savings on administration and drug costs (R² of 0.035, 0.43, and 0.62, respectively). Only drug cost savings remained significant in multivariate analysis. Included studies were heterogeneous in methods, which precluded us from conducting a formal meta-analysis.

Conclusions

In this systematic review, we found a high degree of analytic consensus for the fiscal feasibility of a single-payer approach in the US. Actual costs will depend on plan features and implementation. Future research should refine estimates of the effects of coverage expansion on utilization, evaluate provider administrative costs in varied existing single-payer systems, analyze implementation options, and evaluate US-based single-payer programs, as available...

[read more here]

Obama & Clinton Staffers Join To Crush Med4All (TJDS video)