Dear Senator or Representative: _________________       On behalf of the Puget Sound Advocates for Retirement Action and the organizations signed below, representing a cross section of Washington constituencies, we request that you send a strong message to the Biden administration calling for termination of the Trump administration Medicare Direct Contracting (DC) pilot program which has now been rebranded under the Biden Administration as ACO REACH.

With little difference between the Direct Contracting pilot and ACO REACH, this program represents the final push to totally privatize our Medicare system. We would like you to join us in saying Hands off our Medicare!  We want you to say no to privatizing our Medicare system and no to third party managers getting between seniors and the disabled and their doctors or other health care practitioners. For decades Wall Street has attempted and failed to privatize our Social Security System. We have stopped these attempts in Congress. Now Wall Street is looking forward to privatizing the Medicare system.

The DC/ACO REACH program has created a major financial incentive for privatization. Under this program private equity firms, private insurers, and health care businesses see an enormous opportunity to profit from the traditional Medicare system at the expense of the Medicare Trust Fund and Medicare beneficiaries. That is why they are so supportive of the ACO REACH program.  The Medicare capitated fee program and “managing” health care services for individual Medicare beneficiaries has proven to be a major money maker.

Given that the administrative costs for traditional Medicare are around 1.5%, private sector entities rushing into to the Medicare service business are either woefully inefficient, or they will get to keep an obscene amount of our Medicare taxes and premiums for their profits/reserves.We cannot allow third party profit seekers between seniors and their chosen health care providers. And yet that is precisely what will happen under the DC/ACO REACH program. We cannot allow the quality of health services for seniors to decline, but that is financially incentivized through this privatization effort.

This is no less than the plundering of our seniors’ earned benefits, workers’ Medicare taxes, and the Medicare Trust Fund by Wall Street and highly profitable health care businesses.According to Medicare and Health Care experts the only equity in the DC/ACO REACH pilot is in its name. Nothing in the pilot parameters speaks to rightsizing decades of under-resourcing the healthcare needs of our BIPOC communities and BIPOC seniors. If we want to address real equity, then let's do so under traditional Medicare.

We ask you to raise your voice in saying no to the DC/ACO REACH program and no to privatizing our Medicare system. Hands off our Medicare!