Mary Beth Mohr

08/15/2026

Today is the 91st anniversary of the Social Security Act being signed into law.

If all income in excess of $400,000 were subject to the Social Security payroll tax, Social Security’s solvency would be guaranteed forever. We could also expand Social Security benefits.

There’s no reason even to consider reducing Social Security benefits or raising the age of eligibility. The logical and necessary response is simply to raise the cap. What do you think?

08/02/2026

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07/30/2026

Sixty-one years ago today, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Social Security Amendments of 1965 into law, establishing Medicare, a health insurance program for Americans over 65, and Medicaid, a health insurance program for those with limited income.

Former president Harry S. Truman, who proposed the legislation decades earlier, attended the signing and was promptly granted the first Medicare card.

📸: LBJ Library/National Archives

07/29/2026

🤬

Dr. Oz just killed a program that kept seniors' drug costs down, called it a "bailout" for insurers, and handed millions of older Americans a bigger bill.

Here's what the TV-doctor-turned-Medicare-boss actually did this week.

His agency is ending a subsidy that lowered the average senior's prescription premium by roughly 27 percent this year. Gone after 2026.

That program sent about $3.6 billion to hold premiums down. Now nearly half of the 25 million people in standalone Part D plans are expected to pay more, most of them an extra $20 a month.

Oz swears it's under ten bucks. Fine. Tell that to a 74-year-old on a fixed income choosing between her heart medication, her electric bill, and groceries.

Because that's the real math. Roughly one in four Americans already report trouble affording their prescriptions. Millions ration doses or skip them entirely. An extra twenty dollars a month isn't a rounding error to those folks. It's a decision nobody should have to make.

And notice the pattern. This is the same administration that always finds room for tax cuts aimed at billionaires and corporations. But when it comes to seniors, suddenly the cupboard is bare, and keeping grandma's medicine affordable gets branded a "bailout."

Before running Medicare, Oz was a loud cheerleader for privatized Medicare Advantage.

Gut the subsidy for standalone drug plans, and guess where seniors get funneled? Straight into the for-profit system he spent years promoting.

This didn't have to happen. The subsidy came from the Inflation Reduction Act, the same law that capped insulin at $35 and out-of-pocket drug costs at $2,000 a year. It was working. They ended it anyway, a full year early.

So this fall, when your parents open their 2027 enrollment packet and the number is higher, remember: it wasn't inflation. It wasn't the market. It was a choice, made by people who decided seniors could pay more so donors could pay less.

They spent their whole lives paying into this system. The least they've earned is the medicine that keeps them here.
Call it what it is. Not the end of a bailout. A promise broken.

07/21/2026

🚨 Trumparrhea 💩

07/07/2026

Two health policy experts explain how new federal legislation will affect eligibility for and affordability of health insurance—and how individuals can prepare to avoid losing coverage.

06/22/2026

😡

A Justice Department lawyer just signed a memo saying disabled Americans have no right to live in their own homes. In the same document, she admits no court in the country agrees with her.

Read that again. A government official wrote down, in black and white, that her own argument is wrong by every legal standard of the last thirty years, and she made it anyway.

Here is what it means in plain terms.

Right now, 8.4 million people get help that lets them stay in their own homes. Aides who help them dress. Care that lets them work, see friends, raise their kids, sleep in their own beds at night.

This memo tells states they can cut all of it.

And if they cut it, where do those people go? Into nursing homes. Into institutions. Into facilities where someone else decides when you wake up, what you eat, who your roommate is, whether you go outside today.

A lawyer who has visited people locked in these places said their whole world shrinks to one hallway. That is the future this memo is opening the door to.

Keeping people in their own homes is cheaper. In one case, home care cost under $7,500 a year. The nursing home would have cost close to $50,000. The cruel option is also the expensive one. They want to spend more money to make people's lives worse.

So why?

Because last summer Trump signed an order to deal with homelessness by force, by sweeping people off the streets and committing them. He said it out loud during the campaign: the mentally ill belong back in institutions.

The only thing standing in the way was the law that says people deserve to live in their own communities.

This memo is how they get around it. And it landed the same week Republicans slashed Medicaid, giving every cash-strapped state the perfect excuse to start cutting.

A think tank drew up the plan. A lawyer wrote the memo. A president signed the order. Three signatures, and millions of people could lose the right to their own front door.

We are about to spend the summer celebrating 250 years of American freedom.
Some Americans are about to find out it doesn't include them.

06/22/2026

😡

04/30/2026

The US "healthcare" system is neither healthy for all, nor do they care.