Few want to say it out loud – but when it comes to government-funded healthcare, it's going broke. Medicare's "go-broke" date was recently extended to 2036 – five years later than was reported by the Medicare Trustees' Report last year. But Twila Brase of Citizens' Council for Health Freedom explains that Medicare is going $50 billion in the hole each year – and that five more years of "breathing room" won't solve the problem.
"Medicare is running out of money – like, seriously running out of money," she tells AFN. "The government is pushing people into Medicare Advantage, which even the government says is rationing "medically necessary care" to seniors.
Brase says a new Trump administration would likely issue an executive order allowing seniors to opt out of Medicare. As she points out, they already agreed to it once.
"I would expect that we might be able to get the right for people to opt out of Medicare, which is what we got from President Trump back in 2019. However, COVID derailed the entire scheme and so the executive order never happened," says Brase.
Giving senior citizens the option to get out of Medicare, she says, would allow physicians to dramatically lower what it costs for their care and motivate private insurance companies to get back to covering catastrophic events.
"We have to have real insurance back. We have to give companies a reason to have health insurance for a lifetime," says the CCHF president and co-founder.
She also argues that another Trump administration would safeguard individuals' freedom should another pandemic hit. "We wouldn't have any vaccine or mask mandates," she explains. "So, the whole public health venture would probably be significantly curtailed, even if we ended up with another declared 'pandemic.'"
In a press statement, Brase has urged Congress to act on the Trustees' report and confront challenges "head-on," all the while keeping patients' concerns at the forefront of every reform effort.
