All posts tagged "medicare"

This MAGA politician's disturbing rant shows a party hellbent on hurting its own

“It is hard to watch other states and cities across our nation leap toward socialism… Let’s keep our state moving forward by always rejecting the falsehoods sold by the radical left.” — Secretary of State Kris Warner, Facebook post, November 5, 2025.

Although I should be accustomed to it, it is always disturbing when MAGA politicians go off halfcocked about socialism. Here are some of the “radical left” socialist programs that Warner must be complaining about:

Medicare
Medicaid
The Affordable Care Act
Social Security
SNAP (food stamps)
Meals on Wheels and Office of Aging services

Oh, these are not the programs he was referring to? Many of my friends would be insulted if I told them they and their families are dependent on liberal “socialist” programs. People have such short memories.

Every single one of these programs was once characterized by right-wing politicians as a “socialist program.”

For example, let’s remember what Ronald Reagan said about Medicare before it was enacted:

“From [Medicare] it’s a short step to all the rest of socialism.”
”Medicare will usher in federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country.”
If Medicare is passed, “we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”

I’m a capitalist who spent decades as a high-level executive in corporate America, working in states like West Virginia. Yes, government on all levels is generally not efficient. However, it’s very effective in many areas. And, in some cases, it has proven to be more efficient than the private sector.

For example, Medicare overhead/marketing is 2 percent versus 12 percent for private insurance companies. In this instance, socialized health insurance is clearly more cost-effective than private insurance. We are simply being held back from Medicare for All by the health-care industrial complex (insurance companies, providers, drug companies) that likes things the way they are, with tens of millions of dollars in compensation to CEOs. They say universal coverage is unaffordable, but studies show differently. Canada and other democracies with universal health care all have per capita health expenditures a fraction of ours … with better results.

Traditional Medicare was clearly an expansion of government when enacted 50+ years ago, but it’s one that the public supports. Before Medicare, only about half of all seniors were covered by private insurance. Polls have shown that virtually no voters, even the MAGA folks, want to do away with it now.

Will Medicare for All cause our insurance system to fall apart, as Trump said in his 2018 USA Today editorial? Numerous polls show support for Medicare for All, including one recently illustrating 59 percent in favor. That poll showed support was strong in every category of Americans — except the MAGA faithful. A Gallup poll used the words “universal coverage” and had the same result — 62 percent supportive. Even almost two-thirds of independents were in favor. Again, the MAGA people were the only ones opposed.

America is still free and capitalistic despite what Reagan said about Medicare prior to enactment. Likewise, the sort of rhetoric spouted by Warner is simply a way of scaring American voters away from expansion of domestic programs designed to help the less fortunate. Programs that wealthier people like Warner’s financial backers will pay for and therefore dislike.

I’ve used Medicare as an example, but I could use many others. Social conservatives like Warner have a bad habit of talking about the ills of “socialism.” However, I don’t hear them asking that we convert our government employees in our military into private mercenaries. And, when we have used military “contractors,” the expense to the U.S. has been much greater.

In his Facebook post, Warner also stated, “Let’s always hold fast to our Christian conservative values that made our state the best to raise a family in the country.”

Yet, the numbers tell a different story about the state and its needs for public program expansion. For example, West Virginia has the fourth-highest poverty rate in the nation at 14 percent… and the second-highest mortality rate. It also has the third-highest incarceration rate and third-lowest income.

Instead of preaching about Christian values, West Virginians would be better off if Warner practiced Christianity by supporting the “socialist” programs he criticizes. As the Bible (Proverbs 14:31) states: “Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God.”

Jack Bernard was a corporate executive and a consultant for West Virginia hospitals. He is now a columnist and activist.

These 25 Republicans could demolish a GOP scheme to save themselves

Republicans are obsessed with taking your health care away. This spring, they cut $1 trillion from Medicaid, all to give massive tax handouts to billionaires. For the last month and a half they shut down the government rather than prevent premiums from doubling on average for 24 million people in the Affordable Care Act marketplace. And they “won.”

The number of uninsured Americans is about to skyrocket, which is exactly what Republicans want. It is what they fight for every day: to steal your health care.

These cuts are devastating for seniors, who rely on Medicaid to pay for nursing homes and other long-term care (which typically isn’t covered by Medicare). They are also disastrous for Americans aged 50 to 64, many of whom are in the ACA marketplaces and will have the largest premium increases. Many will have no choice but to drop their health insurance and pray they don’t get too sick before they turn 65 and become eligible for Medicare — literally gambling with their lives.

Even if you’re not on Medicaid or the ACA, the Republican cuts will make your health care worse. Without the Medicaid dollars they need to survive, hospitals and nursing homes across the country are already closing their doors. Far more will close in the next few years, with rural areas and inner cities hit hardest.

The hospitals that remain open will have to cut staff due to lower revenue — even as their ERs are flooded with newly uninsured patients who have nowhere else to go. That means if you get hit by a car, you’ll likely have to go to a hospital further away and wait longer to see a doctor. All thanks to Republicans.

The only people in America whose health care isn’t about to get much worse are billionaires, who can hop into their private helicopters to see their private doctors.

Democrats are demanding that Republicans back off their draconian health care cuts. That’s what the just-concluded government shutdown was all about — Democrats refusing to vote for a budget that doesn’t fix the coming health care apocalypse.

Some Democrats thought that Republicans would come to the negotiating table and figure out a health care fix, if only out of political self-interest. But Republicans are ideologically committed to destroying health care at the behest of their billionaire donors.

House Republican Leader Mike Johnson is refusing to bring an extension of the ACA subsidies, which would prevent premiums from skyrocketing, up for a vote.

This refusal is why House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries has put forward a discharge petition to obtain a three-year extension of the ACA subsidies. If the petition gets 218 signers, it forces a floor vote which also needs 218 to pass. There are 214 Democrats in the House.

That means we need only FOUR Republicans to cross the aisle and we can get the subsidies to pass the House, putting pressure on the Senate.

It comes down to these 25 Republicans, who are in extremely tight races and whose constituents are getting hammered by spiking premiums and disastrous Medicaid cuts:

Juan Ciscomani (AZ-06)
Kevin Kiley (CA-03)
David Valadao (CA-22)
Darrell Issa (CA-48)
Gabe Evans (CO-08)
Cory Mills (FL-07)
María Elvira Salazar (FL-27)
Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-01)
Zach Nunn (IA-03)
Bill Huizenga (MI-04)
Tom Barrett (MI-07)
Nicole Malliotakis (NY-11)
Tom Kean Jr. (NJ-07)
Mike Lawler (NY-17)
Mike Turner (OH-10)
Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-01)
Ryan Mackenzie (PA-07)
Rob Bresnahan (PA-08)
Scott Perry (PA-10)
Andy Ogles (TN-05)
Monica De La Cruz (TX-15)
Rob Wittman (VA-01)
Jen Kiggans (VA-02)
Bryan Steil (WI-01)
Derrick Van Orden (WI-03)

Republicans are betting that by dividing Americans against each other, they can duck the blame for the health care apocalypse they created. Let’s prove them wrong. That starts with flooding the phone lines of these Republicans and protesting outside their offices, to demand they save our health care.

Alex Lawson is the Executive Director of Social Security Works, the convening organization of the Strengthen Social Security Coalition -- a coalition made up of over 340 national and state organizations representing over 50 million Americans.

They torpedoed Medicaid already. Is this precious program next?

Medicare turned 60 years old on Wednesday. Former U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law on July 30, 1965, giving seniors a guarantee of health coverage that never existed before. Prior to Medicare's enactment, it was nearly impossible for older people to obtain health insurance, as they were considered a "bad risk."

Medicare provides universal coverage to Americans over 65 years of age. The law created Medicare Part A as a national hospital insurance program. Part B is a voluntary program for doctor visits and other medical services. Medicare Part C is another name for the privatized, for-profit version of the program called "Medicare Advantage." And Part D is the prescription drug program enacted in 2003.

The Hospital Insurance portion is funded through workers' payroll contributions. At the signing ceremony in Independence, Missouri, LBJ said, "Through this new law, every citizen will be able, in their productive years when they are earning, to insure themselves against the ravages of illness in his old age."

Johnson paid tribute to former President Harry S. Truman, presenting him with the very first Medicare card. It was Truman who, 20 years earlier, had proposed a form of universal medical coverage for the American people.

LBJ quoted Truman's remarks from the 1940s:

Millions of our citizens do not now have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and to enjoy good health. Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. And the time has now arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and to help them get that protection.

It turned out that the time had not yet arrived. Truman's proposal failed to gain traction during a time of retrenchment from the expansions of the New Deal, and a Republican majority on Capitol Hill which he famously labeled the "Do-Nothing Congress."

President Johnson's determination to enact his Great Society agenda (of which Medicare was a large part) and sheer political muscle—not to mention solid Democratic control of Congress — pushed Medicare (and its sister program, Medicaid) into being.

Naturally, Medicare faced strong opposition from conservatives. None other than Ronald Reagan made the ludicrous prediction that if Medicare were enacted, "You and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free." Sixty years later, we are no less "free" because of Medicare. In fact, having guaranteed healthcare makes seniors and people with disabilities (and their families) much more free — from disease, from worry, and financial ruin.

Today, 68 million people rely on Medicare for health coverage, including 12 million who are dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid.

Medicare isn't perfect: The for-profit Medicare Advantage (Part C) program is extremely problematic (see below). The Medicare Part A trust fund will become depleted in 2033 if Congress fails to take action to strengthen it. Traditional Medicare still doesn't cover basic hearing, vision, and dental care — which we have been pushing for many years. But most concerning of all, President Donald Trump and his party have spent this 60th anniversary year actively undermining both Medicare and Medicaid.

The "Unfair, Ugly" bill that Trump signed earlier this month slashed nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid, which will strip health coverage from an estimated 10 to 16 million lower-income Americans. The new law — projected to add some $4 trillion to the national debt — could trigger cuts to Medicare down the road.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is recklessly taking steps to privatize the entire Medicare program. It has announced a pilot project to involve private companies in conducting prior authorizations for care in traditional Medicare. The administration, under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Director Mehmet Oz, also has announced a plan to automatically enroll new Medicare beneficiaries in the for-profit Medicare Advantage (MA) program — a huge gift to the multibillion-dollar insurance industry at the expense of patients.

The problems with Medicare Advantage (MA) have become legendary. Enrollees are basically put into health maintenance organizations run by insurance giants, with limited networks of providers. Unreasonable denials of care are rampant. Patients who become disenchanted with MA plans often find it nearly impossible to switch to traditional Medicare. Meanwhile, some MA Insurers have been overcharging the government for their services and ripping off taxpayers. (Several of these companies are currently under investigation.)

We are watching to see if the Trump administration, which talks a good game about lowering prescription medication costs while simultaneously doing favors for Big Pharma, will honor the provisions of President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, which made myriad patient-friendly reforms to the Part D drug program — including out of pocket caps for beneficiaries and empowering Medicare to negotiate prices with the industry.

The bottom line is: Let's not allow President Trump and congressional Republicans to shred one of the greatest legacies of LBJ's Great Society. We and our fellow advocacy groups are pushing back — and so is the grassroots "Hands Off" movement. But we don't want to be fighting this same battle every time Medicare (and Medicaid) mark an anniversary when we should be purely celebrating.

Max Richtman is president and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. He is former staff director at the United States Senate Special Committee on Aging.

'Activate our seniors': Lawmaker says Medicare cuts could be roped into GOP bill

Democrats need to shine a light on potential harm caused by Donald Trump's mega spending bill, a Democratic lawmaker said on Saturday.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) appeared on MSNBC over the weekend, where he warned all U.S. citizens about "devastating" impacts on the horizon due to the Republican spending priorities.

Krishnamoorthi said it's important to note, "There's also potentially cuts to Medicare that are about to happen."

This, according to the congressman, is because "of something called sequestration."

"The Congressional Budget Office has indicated that because the deficits and debt is going above a certain threshold, there may be automatic cuts to Medicare," he warned. "So we have to activate our seniors as well on this particular topic."

He added, "It will be malpractice if we don't."

"It's incumbent on us to shine a light on this harm," he said

Watch below or click here.

These morbidly rich babies suffer from mental illness — and there's a treatment

It happens every few generations. It’s what drove the fascist oligarchs of the Confederacy to reach out and try to conquer the entire United States in the 1860s. It caused the Robber Barons to murder union organizers and ultimately crash America into the Republican Great Depression in the early decades of the 20th century. And it’s why wages have been stagnant while billionaires’ wealth has exploded in the years since the Reagan Revolution.

What I’m talking about here is the rise of greedy oligarchs who are driven by an identifiable mental illness, what’s either a subset of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) or a defect in impulse control called Hoarding Syndrome.

Because most hoarders never invite people into their homes, it’s an almost invisible illness. But, as Drs. Randy Frost and Gail Steketee write in their book Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things:

“Recent studies of hoarding put the prevalence rate at somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of the population. That means that six million to 15 million Americans suffer from hoarding that causes them distress or interferes with their ability to live.”

That’s tough enough; people afflicted with hoarding syndrome are often tortured by their obsession and socially embarrassed to the point of removing themselves from all but the most essential social situations. They’re functionally invisible. But, from a societal point of view, they’re generally only harming themselves: hoarding syndrome is considered a psychiatric condition, not a crisis for democracy itself.

With one giant exception: morbidly rich people who are also afflicted with hoarding syndrome but don’t live in or even close to poverty.

When people with hoarding syndrome are born with or come into massive wealth, suddenly what was once a personal, psychiatric issue can become a crisis for all of society.

Like Scrooge McDuck of Disney comics fame, instead of filling their mansions with old newspapers, tin cans, and balls of string they obsessively fill their money bins, overseas bank accounts, and investment portfolios with billions of dollars.

And then, driven to continuously hoard more and more money — that now being the object of their addiction — they reach out to use the power of government itself to redirect more and more cash into their greedy hands.

As historian and political scientist Michael Parenti notes:

“Wealth becomes addictive. Fortune whets the appetite for still more fortune. There is no end to the amount of money one might wish to accumulate, driven onward by the auri sacra fames, the cursed hunger for gold.

“So the money addicts grab more and more for themselves, more than can be spent in a thousand lifetimes of limitless indulgence, driven by what begins to resemble an obsessional pathology, a monomania that blots out every other human consideration.”

It blots out their concern for their fellow humans. It blots out their willingness to take climate science seriously. It blots out their ability to see the damage they’re doing to their own country and its democratic institutions.

Ultimately, they don’t care about the damage they do to society; such considerations are overwhelmed by their obsession. They don’t care how many children must grow up in poverty or even die young to support their massive wealth. They don’t care about destroying everybody else’s future, so long as they can get more, more, more money!

We defeated Confederate oligarchs with this disease back in 1865. We beat money hoarders back again after the Republican Great Depression with FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. We thought we were safe, as the middle class grew from around 10 percent of us to around two-thirds of us (with a single paycheck!) by the late 1970s.

But then, in 1978, in the Bellotti decision written by “Powell Memo” author Lewis Powell himself, five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that money is actually “free speech” and corporations are “persons.” It floated Ronald Reagan into office in 1981 on a tsunami of oil and banking industry money. Five other corrupted SCOTUS Republicans doubled down on that bizarre ruling in 2010 with Citizens United, creating an entirely new form of corrupt political bribery via something they created out of thin air that are called SuperPACs.

As a result, today these morbidly rich hoarders shovel small amounts (millions) into the pockets of captured politicians who then provide them with tax breaks, profit-driving deregulation, and government subsidies that return billions to them. And the impact on average Americans over the past 47 years that we’ve been living in the Reagan Revolution has been dramatic.

While every other developed country in the world offers free or nearly free healthcare to its citizens, free or nearly free education including college, and almost universal unionization and a high minimum wage, we’re stuck living in the nation these billionaires have forced on us just to satisfy their own avaricious obsession with more, more, more money:

Almost 30 million Americans lack health insurance altogether, and 43 percent of Americans are so badly under-insured that any illness or accident costing them more than $1,000 in co-pays or deductibles would wipe them out.
Almost 12 percent of Americans, over 37 million of us, live in dire poverty, and 60% of us live in poverty, 201 million Americans. According to OECD numbers, while only 5 percent of Italians and 11 percent of Japanese workers toil in low-wage jobs, as CBS News reports, “For the bottom 60 percent of U.S. households, a minimal quality of life is out of reach.” (And low-income Japanese and Italians have free healthcare and college.)
More than one-in-five Americans — 21 percent — are illiterate. By fourth grade, a mere 35 percent of American children are literate at grade level, as our public schools have suffered from a sustained, four-decade-long attack by Republicans at both state and federal levels to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.
Fully a quarter of Americans (26 percent) suffer from a diagnosable mental illness in any given year: over half of them (54 percent) never receive treatment and, because of cost and a lack of access to mental health care, of the 46 percent who do get help, the average time from onset of symptoms to the first treatment is 11 years.
Every day in America an average of 316 people are shot and 110 die from their wounds. Gun violence is now the leading cause of death for American children, a situation not suffered by the children of any other country in the world.

And these are just the tip of the iceberg of statistics about how Americans suffer from Reagan’s 40-year-long GOP war on working-class and poor people that has managed to make America the nation with the world’s largest number of the world’s wealthiest billionaires.

Almost half (44 percent) of American adults carry student debt, a burden virtually unknown in any other developed country in the world (dozens of countries actually pay their young people to go to college).
Americans spend more than twice as much for healthcare and pharmaceuticals than citizens of any other developed country. We pay $11,912 per person per year for healthcare; it’s $5,463 in Australia, $4,666 in Japan, $5,496 in France, and $7,382 in Germany (the most expensive country outside of us).

And we don’t get better health or a longer lifespan for all the money; instead, it’s just lining the pockets of rich insurance, pharma, and hospital executives and investors, with hundreds of billions in profits every year going to the morbidly rich. “Dollar Bill” McGuire, the former CEO of UnitedHealth, for example, took over a billion dollars in compensation.

The average American life expectancy is 78.8 years: Canada is 82.3, Australia is 82.9, Japan is 84.4, France is 83.0, and Germany is 81.3.
Our public schools are an underfunded mess, as are our highways and public transportation systems. While every other developed country in the world has high-speed train service, we still suffer under a privatized rail system that prevents Amtrak from running even their most modern trains at anything close to their top speeds.

In the 42 years since the start of the Reagan Revolution, bought-off politicians have so altered our tax code that fully $51 trillion has moved from the homes and savings of working class Americans into the money bins of the morbidly rich money hoarders.

As a result, America today is the most unequal developed nation in the world and the situation gets worse every day: many of our billionaires are richer than any pharaoh or king in the history of the world, while a family lifestyle that could be comfortably supported by a single income in 1980 takes two people working full-time to maintain today.

In the years since the Court first began down this road in 1976, the GOP has come to be entirely captured by this handful of mentally ill billionaires and the industries that made them rich.

As a result, Republican politicians refuse to do anything about the slaughter of our schoolchildren with weapons of war; ignore or ridicule the damage fossil fuel-caused global warming is doing to our nation and planet; and continue to lower billionaire and corporate taxes every time they get full control of the federal or a state government.

All because our courts and politicians, now well-captured by rightwing billionaires, refuse to do anything about the ravages of hoarding syndrome among the very wealthy.

Solving this problem won’t be easy but also isn’t complicated. Just like we did with the Robber Barons, the first step is to identify and publicize the problem of mentally ill people among the morbidly rich having seized control of our political system.

We did this before.

As President Grover Cleveland — the only Democrat elected during that post-Civil War period — proclaimed in his 1887 State of the Union address:

“As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

And as FDR pointed out when he began to pull America out of the Republican Great Depression:

“For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things … It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself.”

FDR took on those “economic royalists” and defeated them. He explicitly called them out when the Democratic Party renominated him for president in 1936 in Philadelphia:

“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.

“Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!”

The crowd roared, delighted that he’d turned back the Republican Great Depression and put millions to work while undoing the climate-destroying Dust Bowl by creating, among other three-letter agencies, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to plant millions of trees across the country. And he raised the top tax rate on the obscenely wealthy back up to 90 percent, while stopping an effort to kidnap him and turn the government fascist.

“In vain, they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”

Cleveland’s and Roosevelt’s work now falls to us, as a new generation of obsessively money-hoarding Robber Barons have emerged from Reagan’s tax cuts and these horrible Supreme Court decisions. It’s thus now our job to educate the American people about the mental illness that’s frozen our economy and is dismantling our democracy.

Our task in this time of crisis is to create a societal consensus across America that we’re done indulging these wealthy pampered babies’ every desire, and begin the serious reforms necessary to put an end to this crisis and, like in the 1890s and 1930s, break up monopolies and raise their damn taxes so we can begin to pay down our nation’s debt and rebuild the middle class.

It’ll take a few years, in all probability, but it’s been done before. We can do it again.

Tag, we’re it! Spread the word…

Multiple Trump flip-flops leave House GOP facing 'political blowback': report

House Republicans figuring out how to pay for Donald Trump's "big, beautiful" spending bill are in a bind over whether the president will flip-flop on cutting entitlements, according to The New York Times.

So far, Trump has repeatedly claimed, “We’re not cutting Medicaid, we’re not cutting Medicare, and we’re not cutting Social Security."

He told NBC News last weekend that he would veto the bill “if they were cutting” Medicaid. “But they’re not cutting it. They’re looking at fraud, waste and abuse. And nobody minds that.”

Meddling with entitlements is considered the untouchable "third rail" of politics, but Republican lawmakers know from experience that Trump is liable to change course in an instant.

EXCLUSIVE: Breastfeeding mom of US citizen sues Kristi Noem after being grabbed by ICE

"Mr. Trump is well known for abruptly changing his mind on major issues once his party has staked out a position, leaving Republican leaders and their rank-and-file members uncertain of where he might end up and whether they could find themselves locked into an untenable political position," The Times reported. "They are keenly aware of the potential political blowback that could come from slashing the government program that provides health coverage to tens of millions of Americans."

On another major issue to pay for the bill, hiking taxes on the wealthiest Americans, Trump posted ambiguously to social media Friday that "even a ‘TINY’ tax increase for the RICH” would give Democrats ammunition to use in the upcoming midterm elections. “In any event, Republicans should probably not do it, but I’m OK if they do!!!”

House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has vowed to pass the spending bill by the July 4 deadline, called the balancing act, "a sensitive thing."

He told reporters Thursday, “Look, our true and honest intention is to ensure that every Medicaid beneficiary who is in that traditional community of folks — you’re talking about young pregnant mothers and young single mothers and the elderly and disabled — those folks are covered, and no one loses their coverage.”

Read The New York Times article here.

$10M charity scandal could derail Casey DeSantis's bid for FL governor: analysis

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) had hoped to pass the gubernatorial baton to his wife, Casey DeSantis, when his full term runs out in 2027, describing her as the right person to take his accomplishments "to the next level.”

But an analysis piece in The Guardian suggested that a brewing financial scandal could derail the couple's plans of political dynasty and keep Casey DeSantis from even declaring her candidacy.

According to The Guardian, a charity Casey founded in 2021 called the Hope Florida Foundation with a mandate to reduce government funding for welfare programs has become "mired in controversy," as first reported by The Tampa Bay Times.

The Times found that the DeSantis administration "secretly directed $10m to the charity from a $67m overbilling settlement last year between the state’s agency for health care administration (AHCA) and the Medicare operator Centene. The direction was in apparent contradiction of Florida law requiring such money to be paid into a trust or act as general revenue for state legislators to spend."

ALSO READ: 'Alarming': Small colleges bullied into silence as Trump poses 'existential threat'

The Guardian quoted Frank Orlando, political science professor at St Leo University, who said "Casey DeSantis had essentially been caught up in the escalating dispute between her husband and state politicians, who are making hay from the Hope Florida situation."

Although the next steps for Florida's first lady are uncertain, The Guardian wrote that "some observers believe the controversy has ended any hope she had of becoming only the second woman, after Wyoming’s Nellie Tayloe Ross in 1925, to succeed her husband as a state governor."

But the negative publicity might not be a complete "death knell" for Casey's candidacy, according to Michael Binder, a political science professor at the University of North Florida.

Binder cited Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), "a Medicare embezzler" who won the governor’s race twice before being elected to the Senate. "So these things can pass," Binder said.

A poll conducted by Binder's department showed Casey DeSantis with a 30% approval rating overall, and a 57% approval rating among registered Republicans.

Read The Guardian's full article here.

'Even Trump knows it's big trouble': Commerce Secretary's statement lights up social media

Social media lit up Friday after President Donald Trump's commerce secretary Howard Lutnick made what some saw as insensitive comments about the hot-button topic of Social Security.

Everyone from average Americans to members of Congress have expressed fears that Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency is focusing in on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid as it continues to slash "waste, fraud, and abuse," from the federal government. Trump has insisted the entitlements won't be touched.

But the Trump administration recently made threats that could impact Social Security payments. Acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek, appointed under the Trump administration, suggested shutting down the Social Security Administration entirely in response to a federal judge's ruling that restricted access to sensitive SSA data by DOGE. Such a move could potentially delay or halt payments to millions of Americans who rely on Social Security benefits, including retirees, disabled individuals, and others.

Lutnick, a billionaire who recently gobsmacked conflict-of-interest watchdogs by promoting Musk's Tesla stock on Fox News, added to the controversy, telling the "All-In in DC!" podcast: "Let's say Social Security didn't send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who's 94, she wouldn't call and complain. She just wouldn't. She'd think something got messed up and she'll get it next month."

Social media critics were floored by his flippant remark.

ALSO READ: 'Came as a surprise to me': Senators 'troubled' by one aspect of government funding bill

"Lutnick and Musk will high five this but even Trump knows it's big trouble," journalist John Harwood posted to X.

Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal posted, "Howard Lutnick says that if Social Security didn't send out a check one month, his mother-in-law wouldn't call in and complain, and then says that if you're the type who *would* whine loudly about such a thing, that's an indicator of being a fraudster."

"I assumed the tweet was going to be twisting his words a little, but no. This is maybe the worst political messaging I have ever seen," wrote reporter Jordan Weissmann.

"Narrator: But other complaints, millions of them, came in. And they haven't stopped," posted former CNN anchor Jim Acosta, while the conservative The Lincoln Project wrote, "WTF. This is insane. For so many seniors, there would be no money for food, rent, or prescriptions without their Social Security check. @howardlutnick says if they complain about missing a check, they're a fraudster."

On Bluesky, The Meidas Touch called Lutnick's comments "insane."

According to the National Institute on Retirement Security, some 40 percent of older Americans rely solely on Social Security for retirement income. The estimated average retirement benefit for January 2025 was $1,976, according to the Social Security Administration website.

Watch the clip below via the All-In in DC! podcast.