Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.
With much of the nation's focus on skyrocketing Affordable Care Act costs, the Trump administration recently announced a Medicare Part B premium increase of nearly 10% for next year—an amount that will swallow a significant chunk of Social Security recipients' already paltry cost-of-living boost.
The monthly premium for recipients of Medicare Part B, the insurance portion of the program, will be $202.90 next year—a $17.90 increase compared to 2025. The increase will push the monthly premium above $200 for the first time in the program's history.Jeanne Lambrew, director of healthcare reform at The Century Foundation, wrote in an analysis last week that the $17.90-per-month Medicare premium increase will effectively wipe out 33% of next year's Social Security cost-of-living adjustment , which was 2.8%—or $53.76 monthly.'This is the greatest erosion of the COLA in nearly a decade,' Lambrew observed. 'The Medicare premium increase is the highest in four years, the projected employer-sponsored insurance increase is the highest in fifteen years, and the health insurance marketplace premium increase for 2026 is the highest out-of-pocket cost increase for all types of coverage in history.'To proponents of Medicare for All—a proposal that would provide comprehensive health coverage to everyone in the US for free at the point of service, for a lower overall cost than the status quo—rising premiums across the for-profit US healthcare system provide yet another reason for urgent, transformational change.'Medicare shouldn’t have premiums... or copays or deductibles,' Michigan US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed wrote in a social media post on Tuesday. 'Medicare should cover vision, dental, and hearing. And Medicare should cover everyone.'Sen. Bernie Sanders , the lead sponsor of the Medicare for All Act in the Senate, bashed Republicans for their willingness to entertain a range of healthcare proposals 'except one.''They will never acknowledge that healthcare is a human right—to be guaranteed to ALL,' the senator wrote on Monday, the day President Donald Trump was expected to unveil a patchwork healthcare proposal aimed at averting an Affordable Care Act subsidy disaster of the GOP's making.But the White House postponed the rollout as the plan—which reportedly would have extended the ACA tax credits for two years while imposing new limits on the program—faced pushback from Republicans on Capitol Hill. The president's proposal also reportedly included a scheme to push Americans into higher-deductible plans.'Trump, facing collapsing polling and a potential riot-inducing scenario on health insurance, might have backed off temporarily on the longstanding Republican tendency to ruin the healthcare system so rich people can have more tax cuts,' The American Prospect's David Dayen and Ryan Cooper wrote Tuesday. 'But he’s still ruining the healthcare system, make no mistake, just a bit more stealthily. This has always been the GOP approach to healthcare, and it’s not going anywhere.'
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