If you’re on Medicare, like I am, you know this is the time of year when you have to choose if you’re going to change Medicare plans or keep the one you have. The period of enrollment in new plans is from October 15 thru December 7.

If you like your plan, you may or may not be able to keep your plan. Some Medicare Advantage plans are being terminated, while Traditional Medicare will always be available. But assuming you’ll be happy with your plan next year just because you were happy last year may be a big mistake.

Anna Wilde Mathews, writing for The Wall Street Journal, tells us to beware of making assumptions. “It is going to be a tough year for seniors shopping for Medicare coverage. If you don’t choose wisely, you might get hit with surprise bills for your medications, or learn too late that your doctors are out of network. For the third year in a row, major Medicare insurers are pruning some benefits while adding bigger out-of-pocket charges such as deductibles. “Medicare Advantage plans are leaning toward focusing on margin repair,” said Michael Ha, an analyst with Baird. “And what does that mean exactly for seniors? It means their benefits are going to get cut again.” “

Medicare Advantage

This year, a lot of seniors will be looking for new coverage. Around 3.2 million people are enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans that are closing or withdrawing from their markets, according to Chapter, a national Medicare brokerage.

It is more important than ever to verify that your doctors and other healthcare providers are included in your plan, because hospital systems are increasingly breaking off their Medicare Advantage ties. The online network lists for Medicare Advantage plans may not be up-to-date. It is best to call your doctor’s office, and the insurer.

Seniors will still have access to lots of Medicare Advantage plans with no premium.

The bite will come elsewhere: Insurers are increasing what you will pay when you get care. According to analysts at Leerink Partners, Medicare Advantage plans are increasing maximum out-of-pocket costs, including copays and other charges, by 10% on average for 2027. Primary-care doctor visits are mostly still free. But some Medicare Advantage plans are increasing copays for specialists or switching to coinsurance, which means you pay a share of the total cost, rather than a flat amount.

If you want the least restrictive option, you can choose traditional Medicare, but you will need a special supplemental policy, known as a Medigap plan, to protect you from big out-of-pocket charges. But traditional Medicare still offers the greatest freedom to choose your own doctor and to avoid needing referrals to see specialists.

Drug Plans

Some of the trickiest issues this year are coming in the drug benefits.

The number of stand-alone drug plans continues to shrink—to 316 next year, a 12% drop from this year and a 55% falloff since 2024. The Medicare agency says overall, the average premium for Part D plans—which cover prescription medications—is barely rising. Still, consulting firm Avalere Health found that many people will face a substantial increase in their monthly bill if they choose to hang onto the same Part D plan next year.

It’s a good idea to review your plans on Medicare.gov. There you can compare plans and estimate your annual spending depending on your prescription drugs. I recommend you take the time to do that to avoid any surprises in the new year.

Socialism is on the ballot in the midterm elections. Socialism candidates are running on the Democratic party ballot in Maine, Michigan, Texas, California, Florida and Washington to name just a few. Students of world history know that socialism has never worked in any country in the world, but the younger generations may be uninformed. The lies about socialism can be particularly deceiving when it comes to healthcare.

Take for example, Michigan senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed. He actually has a medical degree though he’s never practiced medicine. He wants you to believe his medical degree makes him qualified to judge healthcare systems. “Once you train in the sciences, you don’t leave that scientific approach to thinking and that rigor of thinking. And I try to bring that to policy problems,” El-Sayed told Scientific American. “You construct a hypothesis of the world and you test it . . . and then you’ll study the outcome of the intervention to see if it works.”

Allysia Finley, writing for The Wall Street Journal, says, “A drug maker would scrap an experimental medicine that fails to help patients and causes severe adverse effects. Mr. El-Sayed and his fellow Democrats want to rerun failed policy experiments at a higher dosage.”

Mr. El-Sayed and his socialist compatriots present “Medicare for all”—a euphemism for a single-payer system—as a healthcare nirvana. The Democratic candidate’s idealized system has no copays, deductibles, premiums or provider network. It promises free healthcare on demand from any doctor. Such a system doesn’t exist anywhere in the world.

Medicare requires premiums, co-pays and deductibles, and as Mr. El-Sayed acknowledged, “as it operates right now, there is some subcontracting to private companies.” About half of Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in privately administered Advantage plans, which are less expensive than traditional fee-for-service because insurers do a better job than the government of controlling waste and fraud. Democrats want to eliminate the Advantage program and move entirely to a fee-for-service system. If you like your Medicare plan, don’t expect to keep it.

Medicare for All is being promoted by all the socialist candidates. When first proposed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders it was rapidly dismissed as socialized medicine in disguise. But now it is being promoted as the solution to our current problems in the healthcare system created by the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare). This comes as no surprise since it was the long-term goal of the authors of ObamaCare to have a socialized medicine system eventually. ObamaCare was just a step in that direction.

But all socialized medicine systems in the world including Canada, Great Britain, Sweden, and others have two things in common; limited access to healthcare providers and rationed care. This means you wait longer to see a doctor and when you do you may be denied the care you need due to your age, disability, or other factors.

Finley confirms this is happening now. She says, “Most countries fund their government-run systems with payroll and value-added taxes, so that people pay for healthcare by having less disposable income. And by enduring delays. Government-run health systems are inefficient and stingy. Result: longer waits for appointments with procedures, if rationing bodies will even approve them.

About 17% of patients in the U.S. wait more than two months for an appointment with a specialist, which is significantly less than in socialized-medicine utopias like Canada (48%), France (45%) and the U.K. (43%). Government-run healthcare means less access, not more.”

The solution is not more government control of healthcare, it is less. As President Ronald Reagan once said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”

This blog is generally about healthcare, but with the important midterm elections coming soon, I felt it necessary to make an exception in this case. “Affordability” has become a focal point of the election and I want to set the record straight so people can make an informed decision who they elect.

For those of you who do not read The Wall Street Journal, the editorial board just published an excellent article to address this issue called “The ‘Affordability’ Democrats? You Have to Be Kidding”. Read the entire article with this link or read my summary of the article below.

The editors say, “Democrats are trying to capitalize on voter frustration with inflation by running on “affordability.” Fair enough, but then let’s look at their record in power on the cost of living and what they propose if they win. Affordable by whom is the question. One basic measure is inflation, which captures the overall price level. The consumer price index increased on average 5% a year during the Biden Presidency, versus 1.9% during the first Trump term and 2.9% so far during the second.”

Both parties contributed to the initial burst of inflation during the Biden years with their spending splurge in late 2020. But Democrats in March 2021 fueled the fire with their $1.9 trillion spending blitz, largely for transfer payments and for states and localities. The Federal Reserve made the mistake of accommodating the spending binge. Yet as inflation heated up in 2021, Democrats urged the central bank not to raise interest rates.

The Biden team also relaxed mortgage underwriting standards, which enabled borrowers to qualify for bigger mortgages and turbocharged the surge in home prices. Housing prices rose 5.3% a year on average during the Biden years, compared to 2.7% during the first Trump term and 3.7% so far in the second.

It costs on average about 2.8 times as much to build an apartment in California as in Texas, according to the RAND Corp. Some “affordable” housing projects in the Golden State cost more than $1 million per unit to build. One reason is state and local prevailing wage mandates, which Democrats want to require for all projects that benefit from federal funds.

Democrats also want to raise the $7.25 an hour federal minimum wage to $15 or higher. Most Democratic-run states already impose minimum wages of at least $15 an hour, so this would mainly slam states with lower wage mandates, many of which have contested Senate races this year like Texas, Iowa and New Hampshire (all $7.25) and Ohio ($11). Businesses pass on higher wage costs to consumers to the extent they can.

Gasoline prices have shot up amid the war in Iran. But the inflation-adjusted average of $3.43 a gallon across the second Trump term is still lower than the $3.89 average in the Biden years. The average was $3.27 in the first Trump term.

Recall how the Biden Administration tried to restrict oil and gas production by cancelling leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, banning new offshore drilling in much of the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coasts, and pausing leases on federal lands. The result: Higher prices.

Or consider the climate-policy utopia of California, where gasoline costs $6.37 a gallon and diesel $8.40. The state’s cap-and-tax program, low carbon fuel standard and hefty fuel taxes have driven up fuel prices and spurred refineries to shut down. Democrats now talk less about climate than during the Biden years, but their goal of banishing fossil fuels persists.

The editors conclude with these important points:

“So what are Democrats now proposing to improve affordability? More of the same policies—more spending on welfare and “affordable” housing, more green-energy subsidies, more healthcare regulation and higher minimum wages nationwide. Democrats claimed the Affordable Care Act would reduce healthcare costs. But that law’s command-and-control regulations drove industry consolidation and pushed up prices instead. Premiums for employer plans have roughly doubled since 2010, rising at about twice the rate of inflation.

As for tariffs, Joe Biden vowed in the 2020 campaign to repeal Mr. Trump’s first term border taxes but never did. You can’t believe Democrats will do so now, especially given that labor unions support many of the tariffs. Democrats also want to raise taxes on business, which would flow to consumers in higher prices.”

We all want prices to come down, but this thorough analysis by WSJ shows the Republican Party is doing a better job of lowering prices than Democrats did under Joe Biden. The Iran conflict has raised prices temporarily, but we should be glad to trade that for the security of knowing Iran is not going to get a nuclear weapon that everyone knows they would use to destroy The United States and Israel – the Great Satan and the Little Satan in their way of thinking. There is a price to pay for freedom.