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Republicans: Millionaires Working For Billionaires to Take Away Healthcare and Homes for everyone else.

Senate Republicans just voted to let an AI algorithm with a financial stake in saying “no” decide whether your mother gets her knee fixed. On Thursday, a Democratic resolution to kill the Trump administration’s WISeR program went down 46-50, every no vote a Republican.

WISeR — “Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction” — a name a Bond villain would reject as too on-the-nose — went live January 1st and imports the single most hated feature of the Medicare “Advantage” scam, prior authorization, into traditional Medicare, with AI making the call on things like knee arthroscopy and nerve stimulator implants. As the Medicare Rights Center notes, the private contractors running the algorithm share in the savings generated by the care they deny. They get paid to say no.

Sen. Cantwell’s office found Washington seniors waiting two to four times longer for doctor-ordered care since the program started there, from about two weeks to as long as eight. The GAO ruled the whole thing should have come to Congress first; the administration shrugged.

Rep. Suzan DelBene, who’s been chasing this thing for a year, called it what it is: “a back door to privatizing Medicare.” Republicans have loathed Medicare since LBJ signed it in 1965, when Reagan himself cut a record warning it would end American freedom. They can’t repeal it — the voters would burn Washington down — so they’re doing it the modern way: outsource the killing to a machine, take a cut of every denial, and call it efficiency. One campaigner summed the Republican Party up as “a group of millionaires working for billionaires who will rip healthcare away.” Sixty years of trying, and they finally found a hit man who doesn’t leave fingerprints...