Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is expected to win the Florida primary on Tuesday. Political pundits are saying that this would just about insure that Romney will be the Republican presidential nominee for 2012, although the pundits have been wrong before.

The last post looked at how Newt Gingrich’s past association with Medicare Part D is being used against him in the campaign. Now Florida television viewers are seeing ads accusing Mitt Romney of Medicare fraud. Could that be true? Here’s the story:

Back in 1989, the private equity firm Bain Capital purchased the Damon Corp., a medical testing company based in Needham, Massachusetts. Mitt Romney was head of Bain Capital at the time. In 1991 Damon became a publicly traded company, and Mitt Romney was on its board of directors. In 1993, Bain sold Damon to another company, Corning, at a nice profit.

However, in October 1996 Damon plead guilty to Medicare fraud and agreed to pay fines of $119 million. Federal prosecutors said that from 1988 to 1993 Damon had been billing Medicare for tests that had not been done. This was going on the entire time that Damon had been owned and managed by Mitt Romney’s company, Bain. Corning, not Bain, was given credit for discovering the fraud and putting a stop to it.

Mr. Romney was never personally implicated in the fraud, and today he says he knew nothing about it. However, the Damon Corp. fraud case came up in 2002, when Romney was running for governor of Massachusetts. According to ABC News, Romney said at that time that he had found out about the fraud and had “blown the whistle” on it, but it’s not clear that statement is true, either.

The issue of Medicare fraud is especially sensitive to Florida voters, and not just because almost one in five Floridians is retired. The current governor of Florida, Rick Scott, was once CEO of a company that was later convicted of Medicare fraud. Scott himself was not prosecuted. But Florida has not been happy with Gov. Scott; recent polls have found as few as 26 percent of Floridians approving of him.

Some anti-Romney television ads show Romney’s face morphing into Scott’s, to remind voters what happened the last time they voted for a politician connected to Medicare fraud. Whether this will resonate with Florida voters remains to be seen.

Mr. Romney has another Medicare problem, however. According to the Tampa Bay Times, “Florida Republican voters have a clear feeling about cuts to Medicare and Social Security: Don’t do it, according to a new poll by the AARP.”

Retirees understand how much they depend on the Medicare program, and this is true whether the retirees are healthy or suffering life-threatening illnesses such as mesothelioma, usually diagnosed in people aged 50 or over. And they want the program left alone.

But according to the Family Practice News, a journal for family practice physicians,

“Although his platform makes no overt mention of Medicare, analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted that, if enacted, Mr. Romney’s proposal to cap total spending and balance the budget would lead to a 17%-24% cut to Medicare by 2016.”

It’s not clear if anyone is explaining this to Florida voters, however.

Florida has long been popular with retirees. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 17.3% of Florida residents are age 65 and older, which is much higher than the national average of 13 percent. That’s almost one in five Floridians who have reached Medicare age. And health care issues are critical to seniors, whether they are healthy or suffering from a life-threatening illness such as mesothelioma.

Next week Florida will hold its Republican presidential primary election. The four candidates still in the running are Newt Gingrich, Rand Paul, Rick Santorum, and Mitt Romney. Much of their sparring this week has been over the past, and future, of Medicare prescription drug coverage, also called Medicare Part D.

Even though it was passed by a Republican-led Congress and signed into law by a Republican president, many conservatives have huge misgivings about Part D.  According to Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser for President Ronald Reagan, in its first ten years Part D will cost the federal government $1 trillion.

Worse, when the act creating Part D was passed, there was no consideration given to paying for it. Today, Congress negotiates every penny of new spending, often cutting the budget of one program to pay for another one. But the entire cost of Part D “all went on the national credit card,” Bartlett said. On top of that, the bill was criticized as a giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry because it forbids the government from negotiating for lower drug prices.

As explained in the last post, Newt Gingrich played a large behind-the-scenes role in getting the legislation passed that created Part D. This week, Mitt Romney accused Mr. Gingrich of influence peddling. While he was working to persuade Republican legislators to approve Part D, Romney said, pharmaceutical companies were contributing money to a think tank owned by Gingrich.

But Mr. Romney has a problem with Medicare Part D also. All four remaining candidates for the Republican presidential nomination have called for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, called “Obamacare.” The ACA already has provided additional assistance for seniors who fall into the “doughnut hole” prescription drugs coverage gap, and is scheduled to close the gap entirely.

If the ACA is repealed, these seniors’ prescription drugs costs would skyrocket. None of the candidates has addressed this issue.

Beyond Medicare Part D, however, the candidates have avoided talking about those “entitlements” that mostly benefit seniors. According to Alan Gomez in USA Today, “people are frustrated that the Republican presidential candidates have largely avoided the issues of Medicare and Social Security with the GOP primary coming up on Tuesday.”

Rep. Paul has said little about Medicare except that seniors ought to be able to opt out of it. But Gingrich, Santorum and Romney are on record as favoring some plan for privatizing Medicare as well as Social Security. In other states, they have been more forthcoming about their ideas for cutting, capping, privatizing, and downsizing Medicare and Social Security. In Florida, though — not so much.

Newt Gingrich’s win in the South Carolina primary is the biggest news in politics. Just a week earlier, polls showed that Mitt Romney would win the primary easily. This should remind us that the only poll that matters is the one on election day.

Mr. Gingrich’s ideas about Medicare and Social Security already have been discussed here. But you may not know that Mr. Gingrich played important roles in bringing about the popular Medicare Advantage program. A look at this bit of his history might tell us something about how Mr. Gingrich might want to change Medicare if he were president.

The future of Medicare really is in doubt. Some experts think the program can be saved as is with better cost control, but others want to dismantle the current system and replace it with a privatized one. So, it’s important for voters to have a clear idea where every candidate stands on Medicare. This is especially true for Americans diagnosed with mesothelioma, most of whom are in their Medicare years. The president and legislators we will elect in November will be deciding which way Medicare will go.

So let’s look at Newt Gingrich. In 1997, when he was Speaker of the House, Gingrich helped pass the law that created the Medicare+Choice or “Part C” plan. Medicare+Choice was a predecessor to today’s Medicare Advantage plan. Like Medicare Advantage, Medicare+Choice provided government subsides to private insurance companies to insure seniors.

Mr. Gingrich was certain a privately run Medicare would be more cost effective than regular Medicare, and he also believed it would be so popular with seniors that regular Medicare would “wither on the vine” and eventually be entirely replaced by Medicare+Choice.

As you may have noticed, these predictions were wrong. Medicare+Choice plans actually were more expensive to administer than regular Medicare, not less. And most seniors saw no good reason to switch from regular Medicare.

In 2003 Congress voted to add prescription drug benefits to Part C and rename it Medicare Advantage. Mr. Gingrich was not in Congress then, but he was in Washington speaking to groups of legislators to advocate for passage of the prescription drug program. Some who remember this have accused Mr. Gingrich of lobbying for the pharmaceutical industry, although Gingrich says he was not being paid and was only offering his advice as an expert on Medicare.

Medicare Advantage has proved to be more popular than Medicare+Choice. But once again, the privately run insurance plans proved to be more expensive than regular Medicare. On average, a medical procedure paid for through Medicare Advantage cost taxpayers 15 percent more than the same procedure paid by regular Medicare. This is supposed to change under the Affordable Care Act, which provides that eventually Medicare Advantage plans will have to bring their costs in line with regular Medicare.

Mr. Gingrich still believes that a privatized system is the way to go. His campaign website says Gingrich wants to “Create more choices in Medicare by giving seniors the option to choose, on a voluntary basis, a more personal system in the private sector with greater options for better care. This would create price competition to lower costs.”

However, first, seniors already have the option to choose to receive health insurance administered through the private sector with more options to suit their individual needs. That’s what Medicare Advantage does. And second, we’ve tried this twice already, and both times the privatized programs had higher, not lower, cost than regular Medicare. What would be do differently next time?

Last month Gingrich told an interviewer, “I would go to the insurance industry and say to them, is there a way you could make a premium support option really desirable? Well, it turns out Medicare Advantage has 25% of the market despite the opposition of the bureaucracy. So, if you had a bureaucracy that favored market oriented systems, you might actually get to 50% much faster than you think.”

However, he has not addressed the reality that privatized systems actually eat more taxpayer dollars than regular Medicare for providing the same benefits.

Texas Governor Rick Perry dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination this week, before tomorrow’s South Carolina primary. This is remarkable, considering that as recently as September pollsters were making Perry the favorite to win the nomination. And the pundits thought a conservative southern governor would win the South Carolina primary easily. But polls showed South Carolina Republican voters were not interested in Gov. Perry.

Last week, Gov. Perry also had lost a lawsuit filed against the Virginia Board of Elections and the state Republican Party to get his name on the Virginia primary ballot. Worse for Perry, he has come under fire in his home state of Texas for filing a frivolous lawsuit. Surely Perry and his fellow plaintiffs realized they had little hope of getting on the ballot, critics said.

Gov. Perry has been a big champion of “tort reform,” arguing that frivolous personal injury and malpractice lawsuits discourage business and increase health care costs. In the past several years the Texas legislature has passed one “tort reform” law after another, with no unambiguous evidence that the reforms either helped business or lowered health care costs. But that hasn’t stopped anyone, including Gov. Perry, for blaming “frivolous lawsuits” for everything but bad weather and pushing for more reform.

Writing in the Dallas Morning News, Wayne Slater pointed out that Perry had pushed for a “loser pays” law, so that a person who files a suit and loses must pay the court costs. Yet Gov. Perry made no offer to pay the costs of his suit. He was not obligated to do so, because it wasn’t filed under Texas law. But it would have been a nice gesture.

Tort reform laws such as the ones Gov. Perry support are sold to state legislatures by lobbyists working for corporations that tend to be sued — cigarette companies, for example. The “reforms” give corporations considerable protection from liability. They also punish people who suffer catastrophic injury by limiting the amount of damages they can collect — for example, people exposed to asbestos in the workplace who develop mesothelioma, a deadly lung cancer. Much of this exposure happened long after the dangers of asbestos were known.

What happened in Virginia? The state requires that candidates submit petitions signed by 10,000 registered Virginia voters to get on the ballot. Further, there must be at least 400 signatures from each of the state’s 11 districts, and only Virginia residents are allowed to circulate the petitions.

The Perry campaign said it submitted 11,911 petitions before the December deadline, but the Board of Elections said not enough of the signatures were valid, and the total fell short of 10,000. Gov. Perry sued to be placed on the ballot, anyway. The suit claimed that Virginia’s election requirements violated the Texas governor’s freedom of speech and association.

The suit later was joined by Newt Gingrich, who had also fallen short of the required number of petitions; and by  Jon Huntsman and Rick Santorum, who had not submitted ballot petitions at all.

A federal judge ruled that the plaintiffs should have sued much sooner if they thought the ballot law was unfair. The candidates knew the rules for months before the filing deadline, the judge said. Virginia needs time to print and distribute ballots before the March 6 primary.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s win in the New Hampshire primary this week cemented his status as the front-runner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. It also means some of his opponents are working overtime to knock him down.

A few days ago Mr. Romney remarked that “I like being able to fire people,” and this quote has been taken out of context and used against him. To be fair to Mr. Romney, he wasn’t saying that he enjoys firing employees. He meant “firing” a health insurance company and taking his business to another one that can provide him with better coverage. And, of course, that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

But since Mr. Romney may very well be the Republican presidential nominee, voters need to know what Mr. Romney thinks about providing health care for people. If he is elected, he would have a lot to say about what kind of insurance might be available to you and your family in the future.

And especially if you or a loved one suffers from mesothelioma or other life-threatening disease, do pay attention to what the candidates, including Mr. Romney, think about health care!

For the record, here is the quote from which the “firing” remark was taken:

“I want people to be able to own insurance if they wish to, and to buy it for themselves and perhaps keep it for the rest of their life and to choose among different policies offered from companies across the nation. I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep people healthy. It also means if you don’t like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. If someone doesn’t give me the good service I need, I’m going to go get somebody else to provide that service to me.”

In other words, he foresees a future in which most people would purchase their own health insurance the same way they purchase their own auto or homeowners insurance, so you wouldn’t lose coverage if you lost your job.

There are very few places in the world, other than the United States, in which private health insurance companies sell policies on an open market. In most countries where most people have access to health care, most health care is paid for by taxpayers. The two notable exceptions — Switzerland and the Netherlands — by law have a mandate that all citizens must purchase insurance from a private company, and the government regulates what the policies will cover and what they will cost.

Hmm, individual mandates, heavy regulations of insurance companies –  the Swiss and Dutch systems have all the elements conservatives hate about “Obamacare.” So where can we see how a real “free market” health insurance system works? There is no such place on this planet, unless you count the United States. And it doesn’t seem to be “working” here.

Ironically, the closest you can come to what Mr. Romney is talking about is Massachusetts, and that’s because of the reforms he pushed through as governor that became the model for “Obamacare.”

In Massachusetts, Mr. Romney has “good insurance options for a 64-year-old unemployed man with a wife who has a preexisting health condition: multiple sclerosis,” writes Margot Sanger-Katz and Meghan McCarthy in National Journal. “Massachusetts law, like a provision of the national health care law set to go into effect in 2014, requires insurers to offer coverage to all comers and limits the amount they can raise premiums because of a customer’s age or health history.”

In the rest of the country — until 2014, when “Obamacare” rules kick in — most of us take whatever health insurance we can get, or do without. Perhaps someone should explain that to Mr. Romney.

With the exception of Ron Paul, all of the current candidates for the Republican presidential nomination are on record as favoring “tort reform.” Tort reform laws are those that place limitations on personal injury lawsuits, such as caps on the amount of damages that can be collected.

One of the Republican hopefuls, Rick Santorum, has been called out as a hypocrite for advocating a $250,000 cap on damages even after his wife sought $500,000 in damages in a suit filed against a chiropractor. (Mr. Santorum retorts that this was his wife’s lawsuit, not his. A jury awarded Mrs. Santorum $350,000 in damages, but that amount was reduced to $175,000 on appeal.)

For several years, several industry-funded organizations have worked to convince politicians and the pubic that American courthouses are overrun with greedy plaintiffs hoping to win “jackpot” awards. This alleged epidemic of nuisance lawsuits is a drag on the economy and causes unemployment, it is claimed. One particular type of personal injury suit, medical malpractice suits, are blamed for runaway health care costs. You can find arguments that “tort reform” all by itself would eliminate the nation’s health care problems.

However, statistical evidence shows that this “epidemic” isn’t happening. In medical malpractice in particular, last year the National Center of State Courts and the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics released a study showing a dramatic decrease in the rate of malpractice suits being filed in the U.S.

Seen any reduction in your health care costs lately? Probably not. In state after state that has reformed its tort laws, the promised benefits — lower health care costs, economic growth, more jobs — have failed to materialize. Most of the data showing otherwise are from the 1990s, a time when the nation was enjoying good economic growth with or without tort reform.

The real effect of tort reform is to protect perpetrators from liability. People who are genuinely injured, and who have real need of damage awards, are the ones who are punished. For example, most Americans stricken with the deadly lung cancer mesothelioma are sick because they were exposed to asbestos in their workplaces — often construction work, shipyards, and mines. Much of this exposure took place long after it was certain that asbestos is dangerous. The plaintiffs are critically ill people, and they or their survivors need the damages to pay medical bills and living expenses.

Now, for Mrs. Santorum’s lawsuit — in 1999, Mrs. Santorum filed suit against a Virginia chiropractor, saying the chiropractor had caused permanent injury to her back. She sought $500,000 in damages. According to the ABC News Primetime program, her actual medical bills at the time of the trial totaled $18,800. The remaining damages were for compensation for lost income, the affect of the injury on her future health, and inconvenienced caused by reduced mobility.

Now, anyone who has ever had a bad back knows that back injuries really can restrict your life. Mrs. Santorum was about 40 at the time of the suit, and she could anticipate many active years ahead of her, raising her seven children and accompanying her husband on the campaign trail. Expenses for things like physical therapy or household help can add up, expecially when stretched over several years. This is what “pain and suffering” damages are for — to help pay for the anticipated costs of an injury that the plaintiff likely will face after the trial is over.

But for her husband to then push for caps on personal injury awards strikes many people as hypocritical. Rick Santorum, a former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, says now that Mrs. Santorum wanted to expose the chiropractor as a “bad actor” so that he couldn’t hurt other patients. That’s fine, but he still wants to limit how much other people can use the courts to expose other “bad actors.”

Continuing a look at Sen. Rick Santorum, one of the current front-runners for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination — all candidates’ opinions on Medicare should be carefully scrutinized. As in the case of Social Security and many other programs, special interest groups are pressuring Congress to drastically change the program, especially to privatize it. These privatizing plans are sometimes called “managed competition” or “premium support” plans.

These plans would divert tax dollars into the private insurance industry without providing Medicare beneficiaries any additional value or lowering overall health care costs. These plans would raise overhead costs for Medicare and also place tight caps on increasing funding to cover rising costs. Critics of the plans say that beneficiaries would eventually end up paying considerably more of their own money for health care than they do now.

It’s enormously important for all of us to pay attention to these issues, whether you currently are healthy or suffering from a life-threatening illness such as mesothelioma. Politicians will be making decisions that will impact how much you and your loved ones will have to pay for health care, and possibly whether you will have access to adequate health care at all.

Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum barely mentions Medicare on his campaign website. His recent speeches, however, reveal that he’s completely on board with privatization. A few days ago he told an audience in Iowa that while he endorses the Wyden-Ryan Medicare plan, he would prefer to have Medicare entirely run by private insurance companies and eliminate the current program entirely. (The Wyden-Ryan privatizing proposal would keep the “regular” Medicare program open as an option.)

Santorum also said, “One of the things I liked about the Ryan/Wyden plan and why I’ve endorsed it — even though I have a problem with the public option part that Ron Wyden has insisted on — it is a plan that says innovation with insurance companies and consumers drive down costs, instead of having this government-run Medicare system. You have Medicare driving the entire health care system in this country and it’s crushing it.”

Medicare is “crushing” the entire health care system? It’s actually the other way around. Although Medicare costs keep increasing, they have increased at a slower rate than the private health care system. Medicare has lower operating costs than the private insurance industry and keeps cost down through careful management. This is in spite of the fact that Medicare recipients are older than people insured by private insurance companies.

However, health care costs in the U.S. are rising higher and faster than in any other nation in the world. These increases in cost, which are largely driven by factors in the private health care industry, are threatening to crush Medicare.

The claim that private industry will do a better job than a government bureaucracy at holding down costs is one you hear politicians make frequently, but there is no real-world evidence to support it. In fact, Medicare Advantage — a privatized Medicare program — has been costing taxpayers about 15 percent more than regular Medicare for the same procedures.

While he was in the U.S. Senate, Santorum more than once opposed allowing Medicare Part D, the prescription drug program, to directly negotiate with pharmaceutical companies to lower cost. As a result, a prescription drug purchased through Medicare costs on average about 58 percent more than the same drug purchased by the Veterans Administration.

The surprise second-place finish of former senator Rick Santorum in this week’s Iowa Caucus is a major development in the contest for the Republican presidential nomination. A few weeks ago, Santorum was so far back in the polls it seemed a waste of time to discuss his policy positions.

But Santorum lost to Mitt Romney by only eight votes, and some political pundits say that Santorum might do better than expected in New Hampshire next week. Against long odds, it appears Rick Santorum has a shot at being on the 2012 Republican presidential ticket.

It’s critically important for citizens to pay attention to where candidates’ stand on issues. In spite of what you may think, the results of elections make a big difference in our lives. Some government programs could be changed drastically, or even eliminated, depending on who is in charge in Washington next year. These programs include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act, also called “Obamacare.”

Some of these programs are of particular interest to retirees, a group that includes most Americans diagnosed with mesothelioma and other life-threatening diseases. But in the long run, these changes will affect all of us.

Sen. Santorum addressed Social Security today in a speech in Northfield, New Hampshire. He told his audience that when Social Security went into effect in 1937, life expectancy was 61 and the retirement age was set at age 65. “We put a system together for really old people, at the time, to make sure that these really old people had some basis of support.” he said. He criticized the system for allowing people to retire and begin receiving benefits at the age of 62.

Yesterday Santorum made headlines for criticizing President Ronald Reagan. He told residents of  a Brentwood, New Hampshire, nursing home that President Reagan was wrong to raise the retirement age and payroll taxes.

“I love Ronald Reagan, but if I would point to one thing during his administration that he did a serious wrong, it was this bill, it was this Social Security fix,” Santorum told the crowd. “He brought the idea of increasing taxes now, which is always what the left wants to do. Increase taxes now and reduce benefits later.”

Santorum was referring to President Reagan’s response to a Social Security funding crisis in the early 1980s. The Social Security trust fund was nearly empty. After considerable debate, the President and Congress decided to protect benefits by raising payroll taxes and phasing in a higher retirement age in 20 years, as Baby Boomers began to retire.

Currently, Sen. Santorum’s proposals for Social Security include another retirement age hike, to age 70, for younger workers. He also wants to find ways to trim benefits. For example, he advocates “means testing,” so that wealthier retirees would get reduced benefits. He wants to “reform” — assume he means “cut” — disability and dependent benefits. He also wants to change the way benefits are adjusted for inflation, so that cost-of-living increases will be smaller in the future.

One puzzling proposal, found on Santorum’s campaign website, is “dedicating Social Security payroll taxes to Social Security.” Currently payroll taxes are dedicated to Social Security and Medicare. Medicare would collapse pretty quickly without its share of payroll taxes. He doesn’t say he wants to cut funding to Medicare, so what he means by this is not clear.

Note that many experts say Social Security isn’t in that much trouble, thanks in part to the reforms signed by President Reagan, and doesn’t need a big overhaul. It should remain completely solvent until 2038, and if the economy grows even a little better than expected, the program should be solvent for several more decades after that without changing anything.

I wrote in the last post that “Candidates at all levels are promoting dangerous ideas to privatize Medicare. In every case, the bottom line is that Medicare recipients will pay more for health care, and there is no guarantee the change will save the government any money.”

In 2012 we’ll be electing a president and every member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Many of you also will be electing a senator. Do you or a family member depend on Medicare, Medicaid, or other government assistance for health care? Have you lost insurance or are worried you could lose insurance? Do you or a loved one have a life-threatening disease such as mesothelioma? The election results could determine how much access you will have to medical care in the future.

In recent months, every so often a politician will come forward with a new plan for “saving” Medicare by turning more of it over to private insurance companies. And whenever that happens, all the newspaper and cable news “pundits” praise the new plan and talk about how “serious” and “bold” it is.

And then a few days later, economists and health care experts come forward to say they have crunched the numbers, and the plan won’t work as promised. All it will do is put more burden on Medicare recipients to pay for their own healthcare, and probably won’t save the federal government any money, either.

The most recent of these plans was released a few days before Christmas. The Wyden-Ryan Medicare Plan is being called “bold” and “serious,” and also “bipartisan,” because the plan was proposed by one Republican (Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin) and one Democrat (Senator Ron Wyden, Oregon). However, so far other Democrats have only opposed the plan. So it’s not really all that bipartisan.

Ryan and Wyden call their plan “managed competition” or “premium support.” They propose that the government provide a subsidy to Medicare beneficiaries to choose among competing insurance plans. These would include private insurance plans as well as traditional fee-for-service Medicare. Competition among insurance companies would keep cost down, they say. They also think that requiring Medicare recipients to pay more for their health care will force people to shop for better deals in the health care market, and this will lower health care costs.

Now economists are coming forward to say that sounds fine, but there’s no real-world evidence it would work to either lower health care costs or save taxpayers’ money. Laura D’Andrea Tyson of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, says “The cost savings from managed competition are hypothetical and uncertain – in fact, there are reasons to fear that such a system could actually increase costs.”

Princeton economics professor Uwe E. Reinhardt say the only certainty about the Ryan-Wyden plan is that it would shift the burden of health-care cost increases “from taxpayers into the household budgets of the elderly.”

The professors point out that people don’t shop for medical care the way they shop for toasters, and Medicare already is better at holding costs down than private insurance. Making more use of private insurance would more likely raise cost, not lower them. But the Wyden-Ryan plan limits the rate of increase of the insurance subsidies, so as costs go up seniors would have to pay more and more out of their own pockets.

This is a reckless and wrong-headed proposal, and politicians who support it do not deserve election.

Ready or not, it’s a new year. Worse, it’s a presidential election year. Take a deep breath, and get ready for non-stop politics from now until election day, November 6.

The Iowa Caucus is January 3, followed by the New Hampshire primary on January 10, the South Carolina primary on January 21, and the Florida primary on January 31. The very last primary, Utah, is June 26.

And then if you want more politics, the Republican National Convention will be August 27-30 in Tampa, Florida, followed by the Democratic convention, September 3-6, in Charlotte, North Carolina.

If you’ve ever promised yourself you’d turn off the television and read the complete works of Dostoevsky, this would be the year. However, as aggravating as it might be, we have a duty as citizens to pay attention to where candidates stand on issues. And this is true also of your candidates for Congress, not just presidential candidates.

For example, politicians continue to bicker over health care policies. The makeup of the next Congress could determine whether you and your family will have access to affordable health care. This is not an exaggeration.

If you or a family member depends on Medicare, or Medicaid, or is uninsured, or is worried about losing employee benefits, the results of the next election could have a major impact on your life. For Americans with life-threatening diseases like mesothelioma, the election results are even more critical. Don’t be fooled by fiery rhetoric and big promises.

Issues to watch for:

Candidates at all levels are promoting dangerous ideas to privatize Medicare. In every case, the bottom line is that Medicare recipients will pay more for health care, and there is no guarantee the change will save the government any money.

Why are these ideas being promoted? Because they would divert a lot of tax dollars into the private insurance industry. Somebody could make a lot of money. Don’t be fooled.

Politicians continue to promise to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act of 2010, also called “Obamacare.” But after all these months, no serious and original ideas have been put forward to replace it. The Republican nominee, whoever he or she is, will be pressured to come up with specific ideas to control health care costs and get more Americans access to health care. But we don’t yet know what that plan will be.

Speaking of “Obamacare,” sometime this summer the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to decide whether or not the health care reform act is constitutional. That decision could have a huge impact on election campaigns, not to mention your health care.

Sometime in the next couple of months, a bipartisan conference committee is supposed to come up with a bill that will extend current rates of Medicare reimbursement. As explained a few days ago, a 1997 law setting Medicare reimbursement rates has to be overridden periodically to keep the amount of money physicians receive for Medicare patients from dropping through the floor. The current override will run out March 1, and if it does, reimbursement rates will drop by more than 27 percent.

So, happy new year. Best wishes. And good luck!