America | Healthcare Crisis


The U.S. is in the midst of a costly and damaging healthcare emergency.


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ast month’s Newsmax magazine cover story exposed how Americans are getting sicker by the day. Our investigation found that the nation is spending $4.5 trillion a year on healthcare with disastrous results.


Cancer rates are soaring, particularly MEDICARE ALERT


Insurers Pocketed $50B for Diseases No Doctor Treated


Extra Medicare Advantage payments were triggered by questionable — even “anatomically impossible” — diagnoses.


G BY CHRISTOPHER WEAVER


loria lee was perplexed when the phone calls started coming in from a representative of her Medi-


care insurer. Could a nurse stop by her Boston


home to give her a quick checkup? It was a helpful perk. No cost. In fact, she’d get a $50 gift card.


18 NEWSMAX | JANUARY 2025 After several such calls in 2022,


Lee agreed. A nurse showed up, checked her over, asked her ques- tions, then diagnosed her with dia- betic cataracts. The finding was good news for


Lee’s insurer, a unit of UnitedHealth Group. Medicare pays insurers more for sicker patients; in the case of someone like Lee, with diabetic cata- racts, up to about $2,700 more a year at that time. But the retired accountant doesn’t


have diabetes, her own doctor later said, let alone the cloudy vision sometimes caused by the disease. Private insurers involved in the government’s Medicare Advantage


program made hundreds of thou- sands of questionable diagnoses that triggered extra taxpayer-funded pay- ments from 2018 to 2021 — includ- ing outright wrong ones like Lee’s. That’s the finding of a Wall Street Journal analysis of billions of Medi- care records. The questionable diagnoses includ-


ed some for potentially deadly illness- es, such as AIDS, for which patients received no subsequent care, and for conditions people couldn’t pos- sibly have. Often, neither the patients nor


their doctors had any idea. Medicare Advantage, the $450-bil- lion-a-year system in which private


among the young.


Three out of


four Americans are overweight or obese.


The U.S. is


the No. 1 country in the developed


world for women dying during childbirth. It is the result of bad medicine, bad food, and bad policy in Washington, D.C. Our story examined America’s healthcare from every angle, exposing the greed of drug companies; our chaotic health insurance system that favors expensive


drugs over cheaper, effective alternatives; corrupt regulators in Washington who put their own


interests ahead of ordinary Americans; and food manufacturers who sell addictive, ultra-processed foods made with chemicals and dyes that are banned in other countries.


In our continuing focus on healthcare, we spotlight this month a disturbing report by The Wall Street Journal which reveals how insurers


HAND©FREEPIK


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