Astroturf
Posted on | April 14, 2009
Medicare Advantage is federally-funded, private insurance administered for profit, and therefore not as efficient at delivering benefits as is plain old Medicare. With a Democratically-led Congress considering cutting Medicare Advantage funding, the private insurers are playing dirty when it comes to cobbling together the appearance of grass-roots support for their profiteering:
Across Massachusetts, senior citizens are [supposedly] writing letters to newspapers demanding that their representatives in Congress protect a form of health insurance called Medicare Advantage….
Some of those seniors are unaware that they have sent any such letters to newspapers. Some of them hadn’t even heard of Medicare Advantage.
“I did not write a letter to the editor. It’s not from me,” said Gloria Gosselin, 75, of Lawrence….
A tip-off to the true origin of the letters came when The Eagle-Tribune received a call from a man who turned out to be an intern at the Boston office of the Dewey Square Group, a national political marketing and consulting firm.
The man, who identified himself as Noah, wanted to know if Gloria Gosselin’s letter had been published. Asked what interest he had in the letter, Noah replied that he was Gosselin’s grandson.
The lies are intended to preserve corporate profits–at our expense and to the particular detriment of senior citizens–in an era of frugality. They know that we can’t afford them much longer, but they will fight us.
