Lawmakers questioned whether Express Scripts' contract with the Pentagon allows the company to overcharge taxpayers and military families while nickel-and-diming independent pharmacies.
Yeah, America and Congress wake up. I needed a prescription the other day my insurance industry price $35 and then I said I’ll take the good RX price at 60 cents.
Wendell, what is your solution? Article after article demonizing private, for-profit insurers (and sometimes non-profit insurers). What is never mentioned, your solution(s). I would venture to guess that Medicare for All is your ultimate goal.
You did take a swipe at hospital systems recently. There are many moving parts in healthcare. instead of trying to tear it all down, why not propose solutions that can utilize the free marketplace. Instead of more government intervention, maybe less as it only adds to the cost problem. As a nation, we can make this work. However, it will take all stakeholders to come to the table and propose workable solutions. This requires parties to not worry about their ox being gored.
Wendell, I challenge to propose solutions outside of M4A. My thinking is you have none.
and continues in the logically vacuous style of the prior one, apparently attempting to have people just see “ACA—FRAUD—BAD—STUPID DEMOCRATS WHO LET EVERYONE CHEAT”, which a certain class of minds take as equivalent to airtight reasoning.
So, that approach seems to be most evident at the very end, with, in the last paragraph:
“Targeting waste and abuse is necessary but not sufficient to save Medicaid, whose costs have ballooned in unsustainable ways because of the Affordable Care Act.”
This may need an explainer—as to why Medicaid costs have gone up—”ballooned in unsustainable ways” is, of course, wording chosen for the benefit of those who get mixed up between words and actual content):
Medicaid costs have gone up quite a bit with the Affordable Care Act, because a new part of Medicaid was added, expanded Medicaid.
Expanded Medicaid is part of the ACA, and covers about 20 million people now. It is the way people without other health coverage, such as from an employer, who are below 138% of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL), get coverage. (There is no asset test—people below 138% of FPL get it regardless of assets—done to make the system airtight and leave no one out.) So, they get expanded Medicaid. (Without the expanded Medicaid, they would not have coverage unless they dropped down to being dirt poor in BOTH income and assets to qualify for traditional, pre-ACA Medicaid, which still exists.) The expanded Medicaid people cannot get subsidized on-exchange coverage, as the ACA structure prohibits them from doing that. This provision of the ACA was done as a cost-saving measure, to keep the lower-income group getting services paid for by the government at the lower Medicaid reimbursement rates.)
—-
Beyond the “fraud” and “ballooned in unsustainable ways” wording to manipulate the less-analytically-discerning, which is the apparent purpose of the editorial,
NOTE THESE:
BIG ONE, in the quoted text: “but not sufficient”!!!
More fully: “Targeting waste and abuse is necessary but not sufficient”.
Do you see that? Thinking caps, the logically capable. Those cuts from OBBB. (Not in effect yet. They go into effect right after the midterms. Coming. Sure to bring chaos and uninsurance to many.)
Begging the question here on “not sufficient” (in the old fashioned logic meaning—not the newer “raises the question” sense.)
Also:
We don’t see much in dollar amounts of the fraud. Keeping dollar amounts out of perspective is a repeated technique of these guys. A millions, a billion, a trillion—what’s the difference—they all rhyme, after all?
and I don’t have a number on loopholes, which would be separate. And I wonder how much the administration is doing about that. (It would be Scott Bessant, not Dr. Oz.)
As various influential people (such as Paul Krugman) have been indicating that there is now an oligarchy causing biased, inaccurate, or selective information and opinion to be reported, with Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, being one of the oligarchs, I've made it a little project to report on new editorials on the health insurance system in the Washington Post.
(I've already found two of them to be highly objectionable, designed to keep the ACA and its associated expanded Medicaid going backwards, and perhaps take them further backwards. I have reported on one of them in this prior HEALTH CARE un-covered comment where ACA on-exchange is being taken backward in the 7/10/26 Wa Po Editorial:
There is a new editorial from Jeff at the Washington Post yesterday 7/19/26, which I have reported on below. (It attempts only to block single-payer, rather than further take down the ACA and expanded Medicaid and Medicaid like the prior two editorials.)
It is entitled “Medicare-for-all means taxes-for-all: Billionaires don't have enough money to foot the bill.”
“Roughly three-quarters of Medicare-for-all supporters believe that it could be paid for entirely by taxing billionaires. They’re wrong.
A recent poll (https://echeloninsights.com/insights/july-2026-verified-voter-omnibus-1 by Echelon Insights found that 74 percent of voters who support the idea championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) and other progressive lawmakers think raising taxes only on billionaires would cover all of Medicare’s costs.”
and, indeed, that is correct. (I went to the survey, and it’s questions 32 and 33.) I have no reason to doubt the honesty of the company doing the survey, or their methodology.)
ANALYSIS: So, taking “billionaires don’t have enough to foot the bill as correct”—I have a little quibble with that to be introduced later, what is being asserted is that most in the group of voters who favor single payer are wrong about how it could be funded.
Of course, the big thing here is that most voters don’t understand that much about the details of policy. It might be 90%, and that would include lots of the people who favor single payer.
(This lack of full policy understanding by most of the voters is clearly understood by lots of people running and shaping things, not least of whom are the propagandists on the Republican side. My favorite example is this Republican claim at the end of last year (made by POTUS, Vance, Mike Johnson, and others), that the shutdown was so that the Democrats could provide healthcare to undocumented immigrants. That is false, and here is verification and the cases of all the people I indicated making that claim, or else with artful deception, appearing to make that claim:
So, if more than 10% of the Fox News Audience and rest of the base understood the policy detail about whether or not that statement was true, it’s hard to believe Republicans and Trump would be doing a lot worse than they currently are in the polls.
Now, switching over to the Democratic side—those referred to by Wa Po in the poll—hopefully they’re a bit better on the policy details than the MAGA people, but they still mostly don’t have a grip on the details.
So, the Wa Po editorial does not refute “Single Payer is the Best Policy for us”, which would seem to be the actual important question.
—
QUIBBLE:
The other thing is, and I don’t know the exact numerical details, but if this country were to switch to Single Payer, then the natural way to do it would be to leave all existent current taxes, take all the money that employers are currently paying for health care, and still use it for healthcare. Which would roughly happen switching it to a new payroll tax, or a new per-worker capitation payment. (There is already just a touch of this system in place with a penalty for employers with at least 50 full-time-equivalent employees not providing health insurance having to pay a penalty under the current ACA.)
If this were done, than I’m not sure what additional funding would be needed. For one thing, the added efficiencies of a simpler system would save some money. I’m not sure any additional money would be needed. And if a bit additional is needed, then perhaps an annual tax on wealth would cover it?
—-
I see one correct point in the editorial:
“Other countries’ systems also don’t offer unlimited care to everyone for free. They ration, constrain and use various forms of cost-sharing.”
Yes, many people don’t know that, and may have the impression that single-payer would remove all of the problems people get nowadays and are complaining about from pre-authorization.
We do seem to have a childish electorate, perhaps made so by special interests always trying to sell people the healthcare items they sell (see https://normspier828307.substack.com/p/a-real-problem-people-watching-cbs) , as well as the occasional politician talking about “Obama Death Panels”.
----
----
What the heck. While I'm at it, I'll put down, redundantly, some of the "fraud, fraud, fraud on the ACA stuff" from the last month or so, designed to justify taking us backwards, and keep us going that way, from non Wa Po sources. (Fox News, Dr. Oz, CMS, the Paragon Health Institute.) (This will be redundant with prior comments in this Substack.)
The “phantoms”, which they had to switch to “ghosts” because they figured too many of those targeted didn’t know what the word “phantom” means:
Lawmakers are all talk and no action how long do we have to wait for them to take any action. and Express Scripts. is just the tip of iceberg.
Right! Nothing will ever be done- no one ever held accountable- no prison terms- just a bunch of bs.
Express scripts probably is proud mostly of receiving so much corporate welfare/taxpayer dollars.
The complexity and confusion, even for Congress, is by design of private for profit commercial health insurance industry and their rich lobbyists.
Time for Medicare for All and stop pretending the lawmakers can control the runaway for-profit corruption with laws and enforcement.
Yeah, America and Congress wake up. I needed a prescription the other day my insurance industry price $35 and then I said I’ll take the good RX price at 60 cents.
Wendell, what is your solution? Article after article demonizing private, for-profit insurers (and sometimes non-profit insurers). What is never mentioned, your solution(s). I would venture to guess that Medicare for All is your ultimate goal.
You did take a swipe at hospital systems recently. There are many moving parts in healthcare. instead of trying to tear it all down, why not propose solutions that can utilize the free marketplace. Instead of more government intervention, maybe less as it only adds to the cost problem. As a nation, we can make this work. However, it will take all stakeholders to come to the table and propose workable solutions. This requires parties to not worry about their ox being gored.
Wendell, I challenge to propose solutions outside of M4A. My thinking is you have none.
Said the “Agent”
Thanks for your constructive input. Is your reply a solution or a slur on my profession?
Medicare for All
Move to Canada, they have that now and its failing
Why on earth.
Now there is another shell game entanglement -TRIWest healthcare alliance-
THE 7/15/26 WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL (The second of three Wa Po Editorials On the Health Insurance System Under Discussion Today)
entitled
“Medicaid Fraud Control Units aren’t doing enough to control fraud Indictments and convictions are down, despite a surge in funding.”
is this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/07/14/medicaid-fraud-control-units-arent-doing-enough-control-fraud/
and continues in the logically vacuous style of the prior one, apparently attempting to have people just see “ACA—FRAUD—BAD—STUPID DEMOCRATS WHO LET EVERYONE CHEAT”, which a certain class of minds take as equivalent to airtight reasoning.
So, that approach seems to be most evident at the very end, with, in the last paragraph:
“Targeting waste and abuse is necessary but not sufficient to save Medicaid, whose costs have ballooned in unsustainable ways because of the Affordable Care Act.”
This may need an explainer—as to why Medicaid costs have gone up—”ballooned in unsustainable ways” is, of course, wording chosen for the benefit of those who get mixed up between words and actual content):
Medicaid costs have gone up quite a bit with the Affordable Care Act, because a new part of Medicaid was added, expanded Medicaid.
Expanded Medicaid is part of the ACA, and covers about 20 million people now. It is the way people without other health coverage, such as from an employer, who are below 138% of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL), get coverage. (There is no asset test—people below 138% of FPL get it regardless of assets—done to make the system airtight and leave no one out.) So, they get expanded Medicaid. (Without the expanded Medicaid, they would not have coverage unless they dropped down to being dirt poor in BOTH income and assets to qualify for traditional, pre-ACA Medicaid, which still exists.) The expanded Medicaid people cannot get subsidized on-exchange coverage, as the ACA structure prohibits them from doing that. This provision of the ACA was done as a cost-saving measure, to keep the lower-income group getting services paid for by the government at the lower Medicaid reimbursement rates.)
—-
Beyond the “fraud” and “ballooned in unsustainable ways” wording to manipulate the less-analytically-discerning, which is the apparent purpose of the editorial,
NOTE THESE:
BIG ONE, in the quoted text: “but not sufficient”!!!
More fully: “Targeting waste and abuse is necessary but not sufficient”.
Do you see that? Thinking caps, the logically capable. Those cuts from OBBB. (Not in effect yet. They go into effect right after the midterms. Coming. Sure to bring chaos and uninsurance to many.)
Begging the question here on “not sufficient” (in the old fashioned logic meaning—not the newer “raises the question” sense.)
Also:
We don’t see much in dollar amounts of the fraud. Keeping dollar amounts out of perspective is a repeated technique of these guys. A millions, a billion, a trillion—what’s the difference—they all rhyme, after all?
So, note total federal spending on health care is about $1.9 trillion a year. That would be 1,900 billion. (From https://www.kff.org/medicaid/what-does-the-federal-government-spend-on-health-care/ )
Meanwhile, I don’t see any dollar amounts in this thing: https://thefga.org/research/americas-medicaid-fraud-control-units-are-failing-their-mission/ that the Wa Po editorial refrenced from this “Foundation for Government Accountability” think tank that they reference.
They also seem to have left off a comparator, that tax evasion in the U.S. is about $700 billion a year https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/mapping-maze-where-irs-could-find-billions-unpaid-taxes
and I don’t have a number on loopholes, which would be separate. And I wonder how much the administration is doing about that. (It would be Scott Bessant, not Dr. Oz.)
As various influential people (such as Paul Krugman) have been indicating that there is now an oligarchy causing biased, inaccurate, or selective information and opinion to be reported, with Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, being one of the oligarchs, I've made it a little project to report on new editorials on the health insurance system in the Washington Post.
(I've already found two of them to be highly objectionable, designed to keep the ACA and its associated expanded Medicaid going backwards, and perhaps take them further backwards. I have reported on one of them in this prior HEALTH CARE un-covered comment where ACA on-exchange is being taken backward in the 7/10/26 Wa Po Editorial:
https://healthcareuncovered.substack.com/p/the-aca-death-spiral-is-no-longer/comment/292163598
analysis of the second prior one -- the 7/15/2026 Wa Po Editorial is in this comment
https://healthcareuncovered.substack.com/p/cignas-express-scripts-pressured/comment/298329165 today.)
There is a new editorial from Jeff at the Washington Post yesterday 7/19/26, which I have reported on below. (It attempts only to block single-payer, rather than further take down the ACA and expanded Medicaid and Medicaid like the prior two editorials.)
It is entitled “Medicare-for-all means taxes-for-all: Billionaires don't have enough money to foot the bill.”
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/07/19/medicare-for-all-means-taxes-for-all/).
So, the editorial starts off with:
“Roughly three-quarters of Medicare-for-all supporters believe that it could be paid for entirely by taxing billionaires. They’re wrong.
A recent poll (https://echeloninsights.com/insights/july-2026-verified-voter-omnibus-1 by Echelon Insights found that 74 percent of voters who support the idea championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) and other progressive lawmakers think raising taxes only on billionaires would cover all of Medicare’s costs.”
and, indeed, that is correct. (I went to the survey, and it’s questions 32 and 33.) I have no reason to doubt the honesty of the company doing the survey, or their methodology.)
ANALYSIS: So, taking “billionaires don’t have enough to foot the bill as correct”—I have a little quibble with that to be introduced later, what is being asserted is that most in the group of voters who favor single payer are wrong about how it could be funded.
Of course, the big thing here is that most voters don’t understand that much about the details of policy. It might be 90%, and that would include lots of the people who favor single payer.
(This lack of full policy understanding by most of the voters is clearly understood by lots of people running and shaping things, not least of whom are the propagandists on the Republican side. My favorite example is this Republican claim at the end of last year (made by POTUS, Vance, Mike Johnson, and others), that the shutdown was so that the Democrats could provide healthcare to undocumented immigrants. That is false, and here is verification and the cases of all the people I indicated making that claim, or else with artful deception, appearing to make that claim:
https://normspier828307.substack.com/p/exploring-the-mass-deception-and
(should be sufficient. For more rigorous verification, you can add:
https://normspier828307.substack.com/p/exploring-the-republican-assertion
https://normspier828307.substack.com/p/further-elaborations-on-whether-the )
So, if more than 10% of the Fox News Audience and rest of the base understood the policy detail about whether or not that statement was true, it’s hard to believe Republicans and Trump would be doing a lot worse than they currently are in the polls.
Now, switching over to the Democratic side—those referred to by Wa Po in the poll—hopefully they’re a bit better on the policy details than the MAGA people, but they still mostly don’t have a grip on the details.
So, the Wa Po editorial does not refute “Single Payer is the Best Policy for us”, which would seem to be the actual important question.
—
QUIBBLE:
The other thing is, and I don’t know the exact numerical details, but if this country were to switch to Single Payer, then the natural way to do it would be to leave all existent current taxes, take all the money that employers are currently paying for health care, and still use it for healthcare. Which would roughly happen switching it to a new payroll tax, or a new per-worker capitation payment. (There is already just a touch of this system in place with a penalty for employers with at least 50 full-time-equivalent employees not providing health insurance having to pay a penalty under the current ACA.)
If this were done, than I’m not sure what additional funding would be needed. For one thing, the added efficiencies of a simpler system would save some money. I’m not sure any additional money would be needed. And if a bit additional is needed, then perhaps an annual tax on wealth would cover it?
—-
I see one correct point in the editorial:
“Other countries’ systems also don’t offer unlimited care to everyone for free. They ration, constrain and use various forms of cost-sharing.”
Yes, many people don’t know that, and may have the impression that single-payer would remove all of the problems people get nowadays and are complaining about from pre-authorization.
We do seem to have a childish electorate, perhaps made so by special interests always trying to sell people the healthcare items they sell (see https://normspier828307.substack.com/p/a-real-problem-people-watching-cbs) , as well as the occasional politician talking about “Obama Death Panels”.
----
----
What the heck. While I'm at it, I'll put down, redundantly, some of the "fraud, fraud, fraud on the ACA stuff" from the last month or so, designed to justify taking us backwards, and keep us going that way, from non Wa Po sources. (Fox News, Dr. Oz, CMS, the Paragon Health Institute.) (This will be redundant with prior comments in this Substack.)
The “phantoms”, which they had to switch to “ghosts” because they figured too many of those targeted didn’t know what the word “phantom” means:
https://substack.com/@normspier828307/note/c-288953391
Then you’ve got Dr. Oz, with his four wild deceptions, on the National Mall, as part of the new “Let Them Eat Pancakes” campaign:
https://substack.com/@normspier828307/note/c-289373653
Then you’ve got the huge and increasing coverage number drops are supposed to all be from stopping the fraud. (Baloney:
https://normspier828307.substack.com/p/the-administrations-claim-in-the
Then you’ve got the earlier leak from CMS that the false due-to-fraud explanation was coming
https://normspier828307.substack.com/p/loss-of-aca-coverage-after-republicans