Seniors are being deceived. President Joe Biden’s plainly misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act” will significantly harm America’s healthcare system. Its drug pricing provisions undermine the incentives for creating cutting-edge medicines and make it harder for seniors to access the prescription drugs they count on under Medicare. But that’s not what they’re being told.
The prime culprit for deceiving seniors is AARP, which recently held a town hall heralding the legislation’s passage into law as a “momentous victory,” which might be true for AARP and its corporate partners but is blatantly untrue for seniors.
The juxtaposition of AARP leaders cheering for this bill when it will reduce seniors’ access to new treatments and cures is jarring. How could draining hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare prescription drug spending to use for Obamacare subsidies and green energy giveaways not hurt seniors?
So why the disconnect? Possibly because, for decades, AARP has served principally as a marketing and advocacy arm of health insurance giant UnitedHealth and its OptumRx pharmacy benefit managers. A recently updated report found that AARP has taken approximately $6.7 billion from UnitedHealth in “royalty fees,” a reward for AARP’s sponsorship (and sale) of UnitedHealth insurance plans.
Additionally, despite concerns over PBMs exploiting their exemption from the federal Anti-Kickback Act, AARP opposes reforms that would pass discount coupons directly to seniors at the pharmacy counter — possibly because UnitedHealth, the breadwinner for AARP, also owns the PBM OptumRx. One of the key provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act was to block a Trump-era regulation that would have repealed the anti-kickback exemption and forced discounts to be passed on to seniors.
AARP’s town hall, which posed as a question-and-answer event for seniors learning about the new law, instead left more questions than it answered. David Mitchell, a panelist and founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs, cheered the fact the United States’s healthcare system is moving closer to a Canadian model. Canada should not be an example for our country in the slightest, considering that patients can be left waiting in lines for months on end for treatments and forced to endure serious drug shortages. If AARP and its allies truly cared about seniors and their health, the prospect of America’s healthcare mimicking Canada’s would incite their panic, not their praise.
AARP’s public advocacy and its favorable, uncritical media coverage are deeply troubling. We don’t even know the full extent of AARP’s financial connections because it has not published this year’s financial report, and several years ago, it stopped disclosing exactly how much of its billion-dollar-a-year corporate revenue comes from UnitedHealth. It should publish those financials immediately.
AARP and its Democratic allies have continuously acted as if they were beholden to special interests rather than fighting for the needs of seniors. It’s time for them to be honest about their priorities. Seniors deserve to know the truth: When AARP advocates, it doesn’t back seniors, it supports UnitedHealth and its own bottom line.
Jon Decker is the executive director of American Commitment.