To prohibit funds made available to the Department of Health and Human Services by previous Appropriations Acts from being used for any activity that makes Medicare Advantage the default under the Medicare program.
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Rep. Pocan, Mark [D-WI-2]
ID: P000607
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Bill Summary
Another masterclass in legislative theater, courtesy of the esteemed members of Congress. Let's dissect this farce, shall we?
HR 6114 is a bill that claims to prohibit funds from being used to make Medicare Advantage the default under the Medicare program. Oh, how noble. How utterly meaningless.
First, let's look at the funding amounts and budget allocations. *crickets* There aren't any. This bill doesn't actually allocate any funds or change the budget in any way. It's a hollow shell of a bill, designed to make its sponsors look like they're doing something, anything, about Medicare.
But wait, there are some key programs and agencies receiving funds! Oh no, not really. The Department of Health and Human Services is mentioned, but only as a prop to justify the existence of this bill. No actual funding changes are proposed.
Notable increases or decreases from previous years? *yawn* There aren't any. This bill doesn't actually change anything about Medicare Advantage or its funding.
Now, let's talk about riders and policy provisions attached to funding. Ah, here's where things get interesting. Or not. The bill simply prohibits the use of funds for a specific activity that might make Medicare Advantage the default. Wow, what a bold move. I'm sure the insurance companies are shaking in their boots.
Fiscal impact and deficit implications? *laughs* Don't be ridiculous. This bill doesn't actually change anything about the budget or funding. It's a Potemkin village of legislation, designed to make its sponsors look good without actually doing anything.
So, what's the real motivation behind this bill? Ah, now that's where things get interesting. You see, Medicare Advantage is a cash cow for insurance companies, and they'll stop at nothing to keep it that way. This bill is likely a response to pressure from those same insurance companies, who want to maintain their grip on the Medicare program.
In short, HR 6114 is a legislative placebo, designed to make voters feel like something is being done about Medicare without actually changing anything. It's a symptom of a deeper disease: the corrupting influence of special interests and the cowardice of politicians who refuse to take real action.
Diagnosis: Legislative Theater-itis, with symptoms including empty rhetoric, meaningless policy provisions, and a complete lack of actual change. Treatment: a healthy dose of skepticism and a strong stomach for the absurdity of it all.
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Project 2025 Policy Matches
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document. Higher similarity scores indicate stronger thematic connections.
Introduction
â 283 â Section Three THE GENERAL WELFARE When our Founders wrote in the Constitution that the federal government w ould âpromote the general Welfare,â they could not have fathomed a m assive bureaucracy that would someday spend $3 trillion in a single yearâroughly the sum, combined, spent by the departments covered in this section in 2022. Approximately half of that colossal sum was spent by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) aloneâthe belly of the massive behemoth that is the modern administrative state. HHS is home to Medicare and Medicaid, the principal drivers of our $31 trillion national debt. When Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law these programs, they were set on autopilot with no plan for how to pay for them. The first year that Medicare spending was visible on the books was 1967. From that point on through 2020âaccording to the American Main Street Initia- tiveâs analysis of official federal talliesâMedicare and Medicaid combined cost $17.8 trillion, while our combined federal deficits over that same span were $17.9 trillion. In essence, our deficit problem is a Medicare and Medicaid problem. HHS is also home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the duo most responsibleâalong with President Joe Bidenâfor the irrational, destructive, un-American mask and vaccine mandates that were imposed upon an ostensibly free people during the COVID-19 pandemic. All along, it was clear from randomized controlled trialsâ the gold standard of medical researchâthat masks provide little to no benefit in preventing the spread of viruses and might even be counterproductive. Yet the CDC ignored these high-quality RCTs, cherry-picked from politically malleable â 284 â Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise âobservational studies,â and declared that everyone except children and infants below the age of two should don masks. Under COVID, as former director of HHSâs Office of Civil Rights Roger Severino writes in Chapter 14, the CDC exposed itself as âperhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government.â Nor is the CDC the only villain in this play. Severino writes of the National Institutes of Health, âDespite its popular image as a benign science agency, NIH was responsible for paying for research in aborted baby body parts, human animal chimera experimentsââin which the genes of humans and animals are mixed, âand gain-of-function viral research that may have been responsible for COVID-19.â Severino writes that âAnthony Fauciâs division of the NIHââthe National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseasesââowns half the patent for the Moderna COVID- 19 vaccine,â and âseveral NIH employeesâ receive âup to $150,000 annually from Moderna vaccine sales.â That would be the same experimental mRNA vaccine that the CDC now wants to force on children, who are at little to no risk from COVID-19 but at great risk from public health officials. The incestuous relationship between the NIH, CDC, and vaccine makersâwith all of the conflict of interest it entailsâcannot be allowed to continue, and the revolving door between them must be locked. As Severino writes, âFunding for scientific research should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid and unaccountable insiders at the NIH, many of whom stay in power for decades. The NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken.â Whatâs more, NIH has long âbeen at the forefront in pushing junk gender science.â The next HHS secretary should immediately put an end to the departmentâs foray into woke transgen- der activism. HHS also pushes abortion as a form of âhealth care,â skirting and sometimes blatantly defying the Hyde Amendment in the process. Severino writes that the âFDA shouldâŚreverse its approval of chemical abortion drugs because the polit- icized approval process was illegal from the start.â In addition, HHS programs often violate the spirit, and sometimes the letter, of conscience-protection laws. Severino writes that the HHS âSecretary should pursue a robust agenda to pro- tect the fundamental right to life, protect conscience rights, and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological realities, not ideology.â The next secretary should also reverse the Biden Administrationâs focus on ââLGBTQ+ equity,â subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage,â replacing such policies with those encouraging marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families. If there is another department that has gone off the rails like HHS during the Obama and Biden Administrations, it is the once proud Department of Justice (DOJ). As former counselor to the attorney general Gene Hamilton writes in Chap- ter 17, the department âhas a long and noble historyââEdmund Randolph, the first attorney general, took office the same year as President Washingtonâyet its
Introduction
â 283 â Section Three THE GENERAL WELFARE When our Founders wrote in the Constitution that the federal government w ould âpromote the general Welfare,â they could not have fathomed a m assive bureaucracy that would someday spend $3 trillion in a single yearâroughly the sum, combined, spent by the departments covered in this section in 2022. Approximately half of that colossal sum was spent by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) aloneâthe belly of the massive behemoth that is the modern administrative state. HHS is home to Medicare and Medicaid, the principal drivers of our $31 trillion national debt. When Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law these programs, they were set on autopilot with no plan for how to pay for them. The first year that Medicare spending was visible on the books was 1967. From that point on through 2020âaccording to the American Main Street Initia- tiveâs analysis of official federal talliesâMedicare and Medicaid combined cost $17.8 trillion, while our combined federal deficits over that same span were $17.9 trillion. In essence, our deficit problem is a Medicare and Medicaid problem. HHS is also home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the duo most responsibleâalong with President Joe Bidenâfor the irrational, destructive, un-American mask and vaccine mandates that were imposed upon an ostensibly free people during the COVID-19 pandemic. All along, it was clear from randomized controlled trialsâ the gold standard of medical researchâthat masks provide little to no benefit in preventing the spread of viruses and might even be counterproductive. Yet the CDC ignored these high-quality RCTs, cherry-picked from politically malleable
About These Correlations
Policy matches are calculated using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text. A score of 60% or higher indicates meaningful thematic overlap. This does not imply direct causation or intent, but highlights areas where legislation aligns with Project 2025 policy objectives.