Millions of seniors nationally are about to receive a nasty surprise — one that former President Joe Biden and Congressional Democrats set in motion more than three years ago.
This fall, insurers will mail out Medicare prescription drug plan notices, alerting seniors to the record premium increases that’ll take effect this coming year. If seniors try to switch plans, they’ll soon find they have fewer options than ever before.
None of this is a coincidence.
It’s the culmination of years of ill-advised Democratic Party policies and price controls designed to cut government costs by shortchanging seniors.
It all traces back to the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act.
When Democrats muscled the IRA through Congress in 2022 without a single Republican vote, they promised it would save seniors money — and on first glance, it seemed like it might. But that hope quickly faded.
The law empowered bureaucrats to institute a socialist-style cap prices on certain drugs purchased by Medicare.
It also rearranged the basic structure of Medicare “Part D” prescription drug plans, effectively passing billions of dollars in new costs onto insurers.
What happened next was entirely predictable.
Insurers have been forced to hike premiums and restrict drug access to offset their new costs. Seniors have been left in the lurch.
And the worst part is, Democrats knew all along that this was going to happen.
That’s evident in the Biden administration’s subsequent attempts not to fix or repeal the IRA’s mistakes, but simply to shift blame, evade responsibility, and prop up massive insurers to cover up their own policy blunders.
Consider how, last fall, Democrats implemented a new “premium stabilization” program that funneled billions of taxpayer dollars to insurers. The intent of the program was to stall the impending Part D premium hikes until after the election.
That brings us to where we are now. Premiums are skyrocketing, and plan options are vanishing.
The numbers speak for themselves.
This year, the average Part D premium rose by 23% — meaning that premiums have cumulatively grown by nearly 60% since 2021, the year before the IRA was passed. That’s the fastest premium increase in Medicare history.
And it’s soon to get even worse.
Premiums are only part of the story.
The IRA has also forced insurers to tighten access to medicines, forcing patients to jump through more hoops to get the drugs they need. Roughly 96% of insurers are implementing access restrictions for high-cost products as a result of the IRA’s changes, which could put some patients’ health in jeopardy.
To make matters even worse, many health plan choices previously available to seniors are disappearing from the market.
More than 200 prescription drug plans and nearly 40 subsidized plans for low-income patients vanished this year alone, leaving seniors with the fewest options since Medicare Part D was established almost 20 years ago. Since 2021, the average number of Part D plans available in each state has fallen by more than half.
Even the number of firms offering standalone prescription drug plans has fallen. In 2024, 11 firms offered standalone plans. Now, just seven do — a record low.
The IRA was always going to leave patients worse off.
Price controls and unfunded mandates like the IRA’s don’t magically erase costs, they just move them around. In this case, Democrats thought that they could shift the costs of the IRA’s drug policies to seniors and delay the consequences long enough to avoid the electoral consequences.
In fact, they’ll no doubt try to pin the blame on President Trump, since the worst of the fallout is now happening under his watch.
But seniors deserve to know who’s actually responsible for the mess they’re now facing. And voters deserve leaders who want to fix our health care system — not ones who’ll break it and then lie about the consequences.
Drew Johnson is a government watchdog and health policy analyst. He was the Trump-endorsed Republican nominee for Congress in Nevada’s 3rd Congressional District, in 2024.
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