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Medicare’s financial condition is worsening—and it’s time for our ever-reluctant Congress to start the arduous legislative task of making much-needed changes to the program. In its 2025 report, the Medicare Board of Trustees is unambiguous: “The sooner solutions are enacted, the more flexible and gradual they can be. Introducing reforms early would give affected individuals and organizations- including health providers, beneficiaries, and taxpayers- more time to adjust their expectations and behavior.” The trustees provide a wealth of data. According to their report, overall Medicare spending will jump from $1.2 trillion this year to more than $2.3 trillion in 2034. Meanwhile, the hospital insurance trust fund, part of the program that pays for hospital services, will become insolvent in 2033, meaning that it will not be able to disburse all its promised benefits. At that point, there will be an automatic 11 percent cut in hospital benefit payments, annual cuts and deficits deepening year after year, guaranteeing seniors’ reduced access to vital hospital care. Given that prospect, Congress has no choice but to act. Lawmakers have never allowed the program to become insolvent. So, the question is not whether Congress will act, but how. It could adopt the conventional response: higher payroll taxes on working families, cuts in Medicare benefit payments for seniors, or some ugly combination of both. Or it could take a different approach, one that aims to improve the program and build on what works. Either way, change is inevitable, but, as the trustees advise, that change is much easier to manage when it is gradual and well-planned.     But rapid acceleration of the costs of the supplemental medical insurance trust fund (the fund that pays for Part B physician and Part D prescription drug benefits and services) poses even more challenges. Fueled overwhelmingly by taxpayer dollars, the supplemental medical insurance fund is today the main driver of Medicare spending. And over the next five years, Part B costs will average 8.8 percent, while Part D costs will grow by 7.1 percent, both galloping far ahead of the projected 4.2 percent growth in the economy (as measured by gross domestic product). For government spending to outrun the growth of the economy that supports it is obviously “unsustainable,” and, as economist Herb Stein famously remarked, what is unsustainable will stop. Unlike Part A (the hospital insurance trust fund), which is financed by workers’ payroll taxes, about three-quarters of supplemental medical insurance fund costs are yearly financed by an automatic drawdown of funds from the Treasury—in other words, by direct taxpayer subsidies. In 2024, 16.1 percent of all federal personal and corporate income taxes were allocated to funding this program. By 2030, that number will jump to 22 percent, and by 2040, it will hit 28 percent—thus crowding out funding for defense, energy programs, and many other federal budget priorities.   Over the next 75 years, Medicare’s “unfunded obligations,” additional taxpayer funds required beyond the program’s dedicated revenues and premiums, will amount to more than $60 trillion. That’s the amount of money required to honor the promises made to Medicare beneficiaries in today’s dollars—a real and debilitating debt. Discussions of budgetary concerns or debt often overlook the unfunded obligations of Medicare and other expanding entitlement programs. Beneficiaries’ premiums account for only about 25 percent of these rising costs, but seniors will face big premium hikes and even bigger out-of-pocket increases. The standard monthly Part B premium, for example, is projected to increase from $185 today to $347 in 2034. Washington’s standard response to rising Medicare costs is to toughen up on price controls or provider payment rules, sometimes bluntly and other times through elaborate adjustments in Medicare’s complex administrative payment formulas. While designed to appear “scientific,” these formulas are, of course, nothing of the sort. Regardless, the price control strategy produces the same result as does hiking costs: making it more difficult for seniors to access care. For Medicare Part A, according to the trustees’ most realistic projections, “By 2040, simulations suggest that over 40 percent of hospitals and 50 percent of skilled nursing facilities and home health agencies would have negative total facility margins, raising the possibility of access and quality care issues for Medicare beneficiaries.” In short, a catastrophe. For Part B (and, specifically, physician services), the trustees report a steady decline in physician reimbursement under the Medicare’s bizarre physician fee schedule. Medicare physician payment is a mess that, as The Heritage Foundation advises, requires major surgery. In 2011, Medicare doctors were paid 82 percent of the prevailing private rates. By 2023, that fell to 71 percent, and this year it will have declined to 64 percent. The Trustees warn, “Absent a change in the delivery system or a level of update by subsequent legislation, … [we] expect access to Medicare participating physicians to become a significant issue in the long-term.” Now is the right time to avoid the long term.   Congress and the White House can start by reforming the manageable defects of the increasingly popular Medicare Advantage program, which now covers well over half of all Medicare beneficiaries.   Top of the list should be fixing the program’s payment to health plans. This can be done by disentangling private plan payment from traditional Medicare’s inefficient administrative payment system and instead basing payment to health plans on straight market-based competitive bidding among plans to offer Medicare benefits. Government payment would reflect real free market competition and would result in genuine savings to beneficiaries and taxpayers alike. In tandem with this payment change, Congress and the White House should remove incentives for fraud and take the guesswork out of trying to pre-assess how much to pay plans with a large number of older and sicker enrollees by instead paying plans additional amounts at the end of the year based on the real extra costs of their older and sicker enrollees. This too would yield substantial savings. Meanwhile, Congress should eliminate stupid statutory restrictions on benefits, allowing beneficiaries to have tax-free health savings accounts, direct primary care programs, drug coverage in Medicare Advantage medical savings account plans, and Medicare Advantage hospice coverage.   In response to the Medicare trustees’ latest warnings, Congress can “kick the can” down the proverbial road. But they have been doing that for far too long. Annual deficits, debt, and Medicare’s programmatic problems continue to mount—and Congress is running out of road.     The post Medicare Needs Major Reform—Sooner Rather Than Later appeared first on The Daily Signal.

House Speaker Mike Johnson delivered a plain message at his weekly press conference Tuesday: Congress must pass the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act by Independence Day, July 4. Johnson, R-La., has labored over the legislation since before President Donald Trump’s election in November, and it would fulfill major campaign promises, such as extending the president’s first-term 2017 tax cuts before their expiration at the end of the year and funding border security and defense. “We just had a big House Republican Conference meeting, our weekly meeting, and I said, ‘Make sure your schedule is flexible.’” said Johnson, who added he thinks the Senate will pass the bill on “Friday, maybe Saturday.” That echoes Trump’s message on Truth Social on Tuesday morning that “NO ONE GOES ON VACATION UNTIL IT’S DONE.” Both houses of Congress are scheduled to break on Friday for recess until July 7, but Johnson says that passing the bill is of the highest priority, even if that means getting home right before the fireworks start flying on the night of July 4. “There’s nothing more important that we should be involved in, we can be involved in than getting the one big, beautiful bill to the president’s desk,” he said. .@SpeakerJohnson: The One Big Beautiful Bill "funds President Trump's Golden Dome to bolster long-range missile defense capabilities… It accelerates the modernization of our nuclear deterrence… and it revitalizes our defense industrial base." pic.twitter.com/YFEdt76Wg6— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) June 24, 2025 But that won’t be easy. The Senate has already made significant changes to the House’s bill, such as making more tax cuts permanent, lessening the severity of the reversal of Biden-era green energy incentives, and reducing the substantial increase in the cap on state and local tax deductions on federal taxes. “I remain very optimistic that there’s not going to be a wide chasm between the two products, what the Senate produces and what we produce,” said Johnson.  Another speed bump on the way to passing the package through both houses is how Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has ruled against supposedly extraneous provisions of the bill.  Under the Senate’s “Byrd Rule,” the parliamentarian—essentially, the chamber’s rule keeper—can throw out provisions that she does not think belong in a 10-year budget framework.  McDonough has been gutting many proposed cost-saving reforms, such as having states share more of the cost of food stamp programs if they have a higher payment-error rate. Senate Republicans are currently working to tweak provisions so that they can survive the parliamentarian’s judgments. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., told The Daily Signal that it’s too soon to tell whether these changes will delay passage of the bill and make it more difficult to get over the finish line and to the president’s desk. “Well, they’re going back and forth on that now,” he said.  “We knew that process would eventually happen, and they’re in the middle of that process, and it could go on for a few more days, and then we’ve got to evaluate it. It’s too early to evaluate. Right now, I want to see a final product from the Senate.” The post Johnson Warns Lawmakers Action on ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ Could Push Back Start of July 4 Recess appeared first on The Daily Signal.

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—A member of Congress introduced a bill Tuesday asking the secretary of state to consider designating the Council on American-Islamic Relations as a foreign terrorist organization.   The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) brands itself as a 501(c)(3) Muslim civil rights and advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., but according to Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., the group is “a terrorist organization.”   “I think in this time of conflict in the Middle East, and this time in which Muslim terror groups are operating with impunity in our cities and on our college campuses, it is important that we stand up and say, ’Enough is enough’ and we designate these organizations as the evil organizations that they are,” Fine told The Daily Signal.   If passed, Fine‘s eight-page bill directs the secretary of state, currently Marco Rubio, to review the work of CAIR and consider whether the organization meets the appropriate criteria to be labeled a foreign terrorist organization. The State Department has designated groups such as ISIS and Boko Haram as foreign terrorist organizations.   CAIR states on its website that its mission is to “enhance understanding of Islam, protect civil rights, promote justice, and empower American Muslims.” But Fine says the group is an “orchestrated Muslim terror front intended to legitimize Muslim terror and to shut down critics of it.”   Fine criticized the organization’s executive director, Nihad Awad, for public comments he made following Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. In December 2023, a video began circulating on social media in which Awad says he “was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into their land that they were not allowed to walk in.”   CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad at AMP Convention: I Was Happy to See the People of Gaza Break the Siege on October 7; They Were Victorious; the People of Gaza Have the Right to Self-Defense – Israel Does Not #Hamas #Gaza #Palestinians @CAIRNational @NihadAwad pic.twitter.com/WDbSRjFJo0— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) December 7, 2023 “If I was a Muslim, I wouldn’t want an organization that says that Oct. 7 made them happy to represent me,” said Fine, who is Jewish. On June 10, CAIR designated Fine as an “anti-Muslim extremist,” citing “his unceasingly violent rhetoric directed at Muslims and Palestinians.”  CAIR did not immediately respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment. While serving in the Florida state legislature in 2024, Fine introduced a resolution urging Florida’s state and local government agencies to cut all ties with the CAIR, arguing that the group had a history of connection to terrorist organizations. The resolution passed through Florida’s Republican controlled House. Fine won his seat in Congress in a special election on April 1. In early 2009, the FBI ended its relationship with CAIR and directed FBI field offices to cut all ties with the Muslim group’s local chapters. The FBI’s decision followed reports that the CAIR was linked with a network that was supporting Hamas.   On its website, the Muslim group denies that it is a part of a “front-group for Hamas,” and acknowledges that because Hamas is on U.S. State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, it would be “illegal” for CAIR to be “affiliated with or in any way supporting” Hamas.   If CAIR were to be designated as a foreign terrorist organization, it would likely “lose their nonprofit status, and I think they would have a very difficult time fundraising,” Fine said.   Fine says the Council on American-Islamic Relations brands itself as the NAACP for Muslims.   “I want American Muslims to find a civil rights organization that doesn’t believe in terrorism,” Fine said, adding, “and I think American Muslims deserve that, but this is not that organization.”   If Fine’s bill passes Congress, the secretary of state, working with the attorney general and the secretary of the Treasury, would be required to conduct a formal review of CAIR and submit its findings to Congress.   The post EXCLUSIVE: Lawmaker Seeks Foreign Terrorist Organization Designation for Council on American-Islamic Relations appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. If you’re tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A new kind of surveillance state is stretching its limbs and quietly inhaling the biological data of everyone within reach. Not with your permission, of course. And certainly not with anything as quaint as transparency. Become a Member and Keep Reading… Reclaim your digital freedom. Get the latest on censorship, cancel culture, and surveillance, and learn how to fight back. Email Subscribe Already a supporter? Sign In. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post The New Face of Surveillance Doesn’t Need Your Face appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Federal legislators are calling on California’s state-run health insurance exchange to explain how it ended up sending sensitive personal data to LinkedIn, a social media platform owned by Microsoft. The demand follows a troubling investigative report that exposed how information entered by users on Covered California’s website was being funneled through ad tracking tools. The data, quietly harvested via the LinkedIn Insight Tag, included intimate health details such as whether a user identified as transgender, was pregnant, visually impaired, or had endured domestic abuse. In some cases, the information also revealed the use of multiple prescription medications. These disclosures took place over more than a year before the trackers were reportedly removed. Covered California acknowledged the unintentional nature of the data transmission and has since suspended all trackers while reviewing its internal processes. In a formal letter to Covered California’s executive director, Jessica Altman, five Republican lawmakers voiced their alarm over the exchange’s practices. We obtained a copy of the letter for you here. “The Committee seeks to understand how such sensitive data could have been transmitted through advertising trackers, what oversight existed to detect or prevent it, and whether Covered California took appropriate steps to protect consumer information,” the letter stated. The correspondence was spearheaded by Representative Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and co-signed by Representatives Earl L. “Buddy” Carter, Gary Palmer, Gus M. Bilirakis, and Jay Obernolte. Together, they emphasized that the situation warrants a closer look under federal health privacy laws. “The extended period of data exposure raises serious questions about the adequacy of safeguards that Covered California had in place,” they wrote, adding that “circumstances warrant examination of Covered California’s actions under federal privacy standards,” including HIPAA. The revelations were brought to light through a joint investigation by The Markup and CalMatters, which employed forensic techniques to track the data flows. Their findings were part of an ongoing series, “Pixel Hunt,” that explores the often-hidden pathways through which websites leak user data. The exchange, which millions rely on to secure health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, operated the trackers as part of a digital marketing campaign. Users were not informed that their responses, entered in confidence, could be shared with a third party. This violates LinkedIn’s stated policy, which forbids the use of its tag to collect or transmit health-related information. After the publication of the report, the fallout was swift. A proposed class-action lawsuit targeting LinkedIn and Google was filed the next day, alleging violations of privacy rights. Separately, a lawmaker asked the Department of Health and Human Services to determine whether the data sharing constituted a breach of HIPAA protections. Subsequent reporting found that California was not alone. At least four other state health exchanges were similarly transmitting data to technology companies through embedded tracking pixels. Covered California has confirmed that it received the congressional inquiry and will provide a response by July 1. The lawmakers have requested detailed documentation and answers, including what exact data was collected, how many individuals were impacted, and how those individuals will be notified. They also want broader insight into the exchange’s overall approach to digital tracking. “Ensuring the confidentiality of health information is a foundational obligation for entities operating within the health insurance ecosystem,” the letter stressed. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Congress Probes California for Sharing Sensitive Health Data with LinkedIn appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A US- and EU-funded initiative is offering significant financial incentives to media professionals across Central Asia, with the stated aim of combating so-called “disinformation” and “hate speech.” Operating under the banner of CARAVAN (Cultivating Audience Resilience through Amplification of Vibrant and Authentic Narratives), the program is spearheaded by Internews, an organization with deep ties to US government funding and has previously been funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The new grant program invites collaborative teams from at least two Central Asian countries to submit content proposals, which, if selected, could receive up to €10,000 in support each. This cross-border framework appears to be a strategic move to reinforce regional narratives under the guidance of external influence while claiming to encourage regional integration and unity. Participants from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan are eligible for direct project funding, while in Uzbekistan, funding will be disbursed as fellowships for individual applicants. Projects are to be carried out over 8 to 11 months, depending on the country. Framed as a push for media innovation, the competition is open to a range of entities; from NGOs and media outlets to freelancers and bloggers. The catch: applicants must be legally registered in their home countries, and willing to partake in training sessions that align with Internews’ standards of what qualifies as ethical journalism. The topics encouraged under the program include regional economic ties, environmental and climate issues, and geopolitical developments. At the same time, content is expected to serve the broader objective of fostering “peace, tolerance, and shared values;” buzzwords frequently employed in campaigns that aim to narrow the spectrum of acceptable discourse. While Internews positions this initiative as a means to improve access to reliable information and empower communities, its goals of “countering false information” and reducing “hate speech” signal a deeper ambition: regulating the flow of content under the pretext of safeguarding the public. Applicants must already have at least one year of experience and possess the technical skills to realize their proposals. Their work must also be published through established media platforms or social media. The program’s emphasis on “originality” and “social impact” appears designed to mask a more subtle intent: reshaping media ecosystems through gatekeeping, all while touting pluralism. USAID has previously had its fingerprints all over the media landscape and has been a major funder of Internews. And while USAID has been suspended by the current Trump administration, the funding of Intrnews appears to be continuing. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post US and EU Funnel Cash to Combat “Disinformation” and “Hate Speech” appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

University Professors Explain the Problems with the Woke, Elitist Democratic Party