BECERRA PLEDGES SUPPORT OF MEDICARE ADVANTAGE PROGRAM
But HHS nominee indicates program is too generous
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, pledged Wednesday to support Medicare Advantage, the increasingly popular private form of the federal insurance system for older Americans — but indicated he had qualms about more generous benefits it offers.
Testifying at a confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, Becerra said, “I will make sure that there is a level playing field” between traditional Medicare and the privatesector version.
He told senators that it is especially important to avoid overpaying private
■ health plans because Medicare is financially fragile, with the trust fund for Medicare-paid hospital services forecast to become insolvent in three years. “We don’t have the dollars to spare and to waste,” Becerra said.
The nominee’s views on how to treat the two forms of Medicare are significant because, in the past decade, the number of Americans 65 and older preferring private health plans has increased substantially. Medicare Advantage covered 24 million people last year — nearly 4 in 10 of those on the vast government insurance program that began as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society of the mid-1960s.
For several decades, congressional Democrats and Republicans have sparred over how much private health plans deserve to be reimbursed for their Medicare customers. Given the amount paid to the plans in recent years, it has become common for Medicare Advantage
to offer vision and dental services. In addition, patients in private Medicare plans often do not need to have spent three nights in a hospital beforehand — as the program’s traditional version requires — to have a nursing home stay covered.
Becerra singled out that uneven coverage for nursing home stays, saying, “trying to strengthen and improve Medicare, we have to make sure we’re doing oversight and keeping everyone accountable.” And he noted that people in traditional Medicare tend to be older, less healthy and poorer than those in the private plans.
In broader terms, drawing out Becerra’s position on private-sector Medicare was part of an attempt by several committee Republicans to portray him as a proponent of what one called “socialisttype policies” that would eliminate the private insurance industry.
Becerra rebutted such characterizations.
During his two dozen years as a House member from Los Angeles, Becerra supported the idea of a single-payer health care system. Since he was nominated by Biden in early December, Becerra has been consistent in staying on the path to widening access to health coverage that the president favors.
The nominee reiterated the point Wednesday. “I’m here at the pleasure of the president of the United States,” Becerra told committee members. “He’s made it very clear where he is. He wants to build on the Affordable Care Act. That will be my mission to achieve the goals that President Biden put forward.”
Becerra’s appearance before the Senate Finance Committee was the second of his two confirmation hearings, coming a day after he testified before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
All the groceries spoiled and the water was out for days. Then Melissa Rogers, a believer in the Texas gospel that government should know its place, woke up to a $6,000 energy bill before the snow and ice even melted.
“The roads were awful, but we were running around town trying to get money from every single bank we could possibly think of,” said Rogers, 36, whose Fort Worth family of four was left with $80 after the charges drained her accounts and took her husband’s paycheck.
Now, the emerging response to a winter catastrophe that caused one of the worst power outages in U.S. history is not the usual one in Texas: demands for more regulation.
Today , managers of Texas’ power grid are expected to receive a lashing in the first public hearings about the crisis at the state Capitol — where the belief that less government is better is reflected in a part-time Legislature that meets just once every two years, and only for 140 days. The current session ends in May.
That leaves Texas little time to make last week’s plunge into freezing darkness
that touched nearly all of the state’s 30 million residents one way or another — including grocery shelves left bare and miles of busted water pipes — produce tougher regulations that the state’s GOP majority has resisted for decades. At the same time, warnings ignored after a previous deep Texas freeze in 2011 have baked in skepticism.
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott wants to force power plants to winterize after nearly half of the state’s generation capacity was knocked offline by subfreezing temperatures. There’s also new support for guardrails on Texas’ deregulated electric market to prevent astronomical energy bills that financially devastated homeowners like Rogers, who frantically emptied her savings after wholesale prices, which are typically as low as a couple of cents per kilowatt-hour, spiked to $9 per kilowatt-hour.
At $9 a kilowatt-hour, the average U.S. home would have a monthly electric bill of about $8,000.
“In a lot of respects, we’re victims of our own attempt to let free market forces work,” said Republican state Rep. Drew Darby, who sits on the House Energy Resources Committee that is digging into the outages.
His rural district includes two or three homes in the Texas oil patch that burned down as the power lurched off and on, and he heard of plants that couldn’t burn piles of frozen coal outside. Even before the storm dropped six inches of snow as far south as San Antonio, generators in Texas were required to submit safeguard plans for cold weather. Darby suspects enforcement was scant.
“Typically, you know, the Texas Legislature pushes back on overregulation,” Darby said. “However, my view on something as basic to human survival and need is we need to have reliable power and water.”
At least six board members of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state’s power grid, resigned this week ahead of likely calls for their ouster at the hearings. Officials in Houston have opened their own investigations into the outages, and prosecutors in Austin say they will investigate potential criminal wrongdoing.
President Joe Biden is set to fly to Texas on Friday, a trip that marks his first visit to a disaster site since taking office. Just weeks before the outages, Abbott had ordered state agencies to look for ways to sue the new administration over energy regulations that he said would hamper the state’s biggest industry.
Abbott has put much of the fault on ERCOT, which he accuses of misleading Texas about the grid’s readiness. But Abbott’s handpicked appointees govern the state’s Public Utility Commission that oversees ERCOT.
A federal report after the 2011 outages urged hardening electric generators against extreme cold, but neither the commission nor ERCOT required plant owners to do anything more than file the weatherization plans. There are no standards for what must be in those plans.