HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra Dressing Up His Real Record With Designs on Run for CA Governor

The 2024 Annual Report of the Boards of Trustees of the Federal Hospital Insurance Trust Fund and the Federal Supplementary Medical Insurance Trust Fund was released May 6th.

Before your eyes glaze over, this report gives us the current financial state of the Medicare program, and projects its future financial solvency… it’s safe to assume that this report is important.

One assertion of the 2024 report is that Medicare solvency has been extended 5 more years than the 2023 projection, and won’t go broke until 2036. And magically, the 2023 report projected that solvency of the Medicare program would be 2031, three years later than the date projected in the 2022 report.

But as we witness daily with the Biden Administration, there is a lot more to the story – like who is behind the report.

However, the 261 page report, which anyone in America would expect to be accurate and credible, is politically biased. This political bias is easy to uncover because of who is on the Board, and who submitted this report to the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate: Biden Administration appointees.

Chief among them is Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, who has made no secret of his ambitions to run for Governor of California in 2026, and appears to be positioning himself exactly for that right now.

Remember, Xavier Becerra as HHS Secretary doubled down on tyrannical COVID policies, including mandatory masking and vaccines for everyone including pregnant women and infants, as well as business and school lockdowns. And, Becerra’s appointment was purely political, as Becerra had no health related experience – he was a member of congress for 25 years before being appointed California Attorney General by Gov. Jerry Brown – which was also a strange appointment as well, as I reported in 2018 following his entanglements, as he was up to his eyeballs in the House Democratic Caucus Pakistani Awan Brothers Congressional IT Scandal. Then-Rep. Xavier Becerra was the caucus chairman when he gave a fake server to the cops in order to obstruct their investigation. (This is where Scooby Doo masterfully says “Ruh Roh.”)

Also on the Board are Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who famously said inflation was “transitory,” and a “small risk” back in 2021, ahead of the Biden Administration’s push to pass $1.9 Trillion in spending.

The Board also features California’s controversial former Labor Secretary, now acting Labor Secretary Julie Su who is still trying to shake off the $55 billion in unemployment fraud, former Maryland Governor Martin O’ Malley, and longtime Democratic staffer turned policy analyst Chiquita Brooks-LaSure.

These partisans all have a strong motive in telling us the unbiased truth about Medicare’s financial health (wink wink)… but Becerra in particular, has an interest in painting a rosy picture of Medicare – he has an image to curate and a reputation to save. Becerra would love nothing more than going into the gubernatorial race as the guy who addressed and prevented Medicare (in)solvency, and improved it for today’s seniors and tomorrow’s baby boomers.

Much like Gov. Newsom’s budget, the report relies on a lot of accounting tricks and gimmicks to deliver the necessary conclusion that Medicare is magically more solvent this year than it was last year – and even more solvent than in 2022.

One thing that comes up in the positive future assumptions for Medicare’s future time and again in this report is the Inflation Reduction Act. The authors give the IRA credit for future savings on prescription drugs due to the price negotiation component of the bill.

The trouble is, 2026 is the first year marked for “maximum fair prices” in the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program, and drugmakers have said all along that they will challenge the policy in court before it can be implemented. In addition, the drug price negotiations included in the Inflation Reduction Act were so massively ratcheted back that it’s hard to believe they will have a significant effect. No one knows yet whether the anticipated savings from IRA provisions will even accumulate. It seems unlikely that they could save so much and be the basis for Medicare’s solvency improving as much as the report claims.

The Becerra-Yellen-O’Mally-Su-Brooks LaSure-Board went to great lengths to give credit for potential and unknown savings to legislation to their boss – Joe Biden – and views this as one of his major achievements, despite the fact the legislation didn’t reduce inflation. “Experts say the law can take little to no responsibility for the drop in the inflation rate,” the Associated Press reported in 2023.

While the Inflation Reduction Act received praise throughout the report, what was notably missing was credit where it was actually due– for Medicare Advantage.

Medicare Advantage has previously been shown to increase entitlement solvency by Avalere Consulting. “The Hospital Insurance Trust Fund would remain solvent until 2048 if fee-for-service utilization levels were similar to Medicare Advantage utilization levels,” Avalere found.

This is despite the fact that the Medicare Advantage program is caring for more complex patients than traditional Medicare fee-for-service (FFS). So Medicare Advantage saves money anyway. But it does so to an even greater degree because it takes beneficiaries with more complex cases out of fee-for-service. This is important because one big thing that changed between the last assessment by this particular Board of Trustees and this most recent one is an increase in the number of eligible enrolles who choose Medicare Advantage over fee-for-service.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the percentage of those eligible enrollees who used Medicare Advantage went up in just one year from 48 percent to 51 percent. Given that the raw number of Medicare-eligible Americans has continuously risen over time (exception for 2020 when COVID deaths forced it down), it is infinitely more plausible that heightened use of Medicare Advantage, not a not-yet-even-implemented Inflation Reduction Act drug price negotiation scheme, is responsible for Medicare being in better financial health.

Ironically, however, while the Biden administration – including wanna-be Governor Becerra – are reaping the benefits of a better solvency outlook for Medicare thanks to Medicare Advantage, the Biden Administration has consistently made cuts to the Medicare Advantage program. “Critics, including Florida Senator Rick Scott, argue that the decision could translate into tangible decreases in health care coverage for those reliant on these plans, with projected reductions amounting to $33 monthly or $396 annually per beneficiary,” Newsweek reported in April.

In fact, these “cuts to Medicare Advantage were also a feature of the Obama Administration as a major part of the way Democrats financed Obamacare. The cuts are one of many aspects of Obamacare that put pressure on health care access, because insurers that are receiving less money from the government cannot offer as broad a choice of medical providers to their beneficiaries,” according to the Washington Examiner in 2014.

Will anyone call Becerra out on this as he moves closer and closer to a run for Governor? Especially since according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, more than 50% of eligible seniors choose Medicare Advantage. You have to hope the answer is “yes,” but since this is complicated stuff that runs counter to dominant progressive narratives, the answer may well be “no.”