Case in point is the $15 billion giveaway that Biden-Harris snuck through this summer without a single hearing, vote, or advance notice, in an attempt to buy seniors’ votes. Followed up by a campaign email to these same seniors on behalf of Kamala Harris, also paid for by taxpayers.
Is any of this legal? Who cares, if it helps Harris win in November? At least, that’s how the mainstream press is treating this scandal.
Here’s the background.
The criminally misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act” that Joe Biden signed on Aug. 16, 2022, after Harris cast the tie-breaking vote, including among its many horrid provisions, several that affected Medicare Part D – the drug benefit for seniors – is set to go into effect in 2025.
Biden and now Harris have been running around claiming that this was a tremendous deal for seniors, except those provisions added huge costs to these drug plans that were going to jack up monthly premiums for this benefit by an average of $110 – a 179% increase!
So, to avoid that, the administration conjured up a “demonstration project” whereby insurance companies would agree to hold monthly premium increases to $35 or less in exchange for a pile of cash.
The Congressional Budget Office figures this will cost $5 billion a year – in borrowed money – plus another $2 billion a year in added interest costs on the national debt.
Critics have pointed out that this wasn’t a “demonstration project,” normally understood as a small-scale effort to test a change in rules governing a program. Instead, it was a subsidy handed out to every insurance company offering Part D plans.
“Effectively, the Biden administration is forcibly keeping Part D premiums artificially ‘stable’ on the taxpayer’s dime,” notes the American Action Forum’s John Walker.
House Republicans described it as “an unchecked taxpayer-funded bailout to paper over the flaws in the Inflation Reduction Act.”
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There’s a simpler way to describe it. A vote-buying scam.************
building the coffers for the long and projected lawfare that is surely coming
issuesinsights.com/2024/10/31/the-15-billion-biden-harris-scandal-nobody-is-talking-about/