This week on CounterSpin:
Headlined “The Cash Monster Was Insatiable,” a 2022 New York Times piece reported insurance companies gaming Medicare Advantage, originally presented as a “low-cost” alternative to traditional Medicare. One company pressed doctors to add additional illnesses to the records of patients they hadn’t seen for weeks: Dig up enough new diagnoses, and you could win a bottle of champagne. Some companies cherry-picked healthier seniors for enrollment.
Such maneuvers don’t lead to good health outcomes but serve the real goal: netting private insurers more money. Here to discuss new research on the problem and the response is David Himmelstein, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program and co-author of this new analysis of Medicare Advantage.
You may get the impression from media that marijuana is legal everywhere now, that it’s moved from blight to business, if you will. It’s not as simple as that, and many people harmed by decades of criminalization have yet to see any benefit from decriminalization. Our guest Tauhid Chappell has tracked the issue for years now; he teaches the country’s first graduate-level course on equity movements in the cannabis industry, at Thomas Jefferson University.
But first, Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Julian Assange.