Millions of seniors and people with disabilities rely on Medicare, but if the authors of Project 2025 get their way, we can kiss our hard-earned health coverage goodbye.
Project 2025 would make corporate insurance plans—run by the likes of Aetna and UnitedHealthcare—the default option for people enrolling in Medicare.1 This would be a windfall for Wall Street, but a disaster for patients and health care providers.
Sixty-seven million older adults and people with disabilities rely on Medicare as their primary health insurance and 81% of Americans hold a positive view of traditional Medicare.2,3
Making corporate insurance plans the default option is the privatization of Medicare that the right-wing has been pushing for decades. Completely privatizing Medicare will only hurt the people who need it most while increasing profits for greedy insurance companies.
There are currently two forms of Medicare in the United States: traditional Medicare, which is run by the federal government and accepted by nearly all doctors and hospitals, and there’s Medicare Advantage (MA), a collection of private health care plans that beneficiaries can choose in place of traditional Medicare.
In 2024, a Congressional investigative agency found that the Medicare program will pay Medicare Advantage $83 billionmore than what it would cost if every beneficiary was on traditional Medicare.[4]
On page 498, Project 2025 states it would repeal “health policies enacted under the Obama and Biden Administrations such as the Medicare Shared Savings Program and Inflation Reduction Act.”[5] The Inflation Reduction Act gave Medicare the ability to negotiate drug prices. Project 2025 would undo all of that while also cutting recipients off from life-saving care.