By Sheila Payne, Board member and outgoing Co-Chair

The Alachua County Labor Coalition is shaking off the COVID blahs and continuing our work on housing and legal system transformation advocacy. We just elected a whole new slate of enthusiastic Executive Board members at our in-person and virtual membership meeting on Feb. 15. We continue to add liaisons and representatives from each of our 24 member organizations to sit on the executive board. There are calls to get involved in helping to organize some folks interested in union organizing.

A group in Marion County also wants to start a Marion County Labor Coalition, using ACLC as a model.

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By Marilyn Eisenberg

Many of us retired folks in Labor Coalition have signed onto the publicly-funded Traditional Medicare Plan with or without Supplements.  Even though Medicare Advantage (MA) Plans offer attractive perks to healthy retirees, we all know that for serious illnesses and injuries, these plans fall apart.  MA Plans find devious ways of not covering the expenses they had promised, usually invoking the not-in-network excuses causing many ‘surprise’ bills to their hapless recipients.
 
But what you might not know is that the Medicare that we have relied on for many years is being undercut by a plan initiated in the Trump presidency, but continuing under the  Biden administration.  The plan is called Direct Contracting Entities (DCE’s).  Without Congressional approval or oversight, it will slowly strip our Medicare of its public funding, and make it into a private profit-making insurance plan, much like our present private insurance companies and the assorted Medicare Advantage Plans.

If you want to learn more about this outrage and what to do about it, follow the links below provided by Physicians for a National Healthcare Plan.  This organization has already caught the attention of many Congressman and Health and Human Secretary Xavier Becerra.  But the practice persists, and unless the government takes swift action, all our non-profit Medicare coverage will be gone by 2030.

Want to learn more about Medicare Direct Contracting? Visit pnhp.org/StopDCEs, where you’ll find:

 

• Fact sheet: Direct Contracting: Quietly Handing Medicare to Wall Street (1 page)

• Policy primer: Medicare Direct Contracting Explained (4 pages)

• Video: Dr. Ana Malinow explains Medicare Direct Contracting (15 minutes)

• PowerPoint: Direct Contracting: Handing Traditional Medicare to Wall Street