To the Editor: Liz Fowler recently announced that — contrary to her previously announced plans of letting the current model of Medicare ACO REACH run to 2026 — she has stopped accepting new businesses into this model. Who is Liz Fowler, and why should we care about her or, for that matter, ACO REACH?

First, I hope you’ll look at this link: https://youtu.be/hZ5tj4cN9Jk. It’s a video clip showing Bill Moyers — still living, thank heaven, at the age of 88 — and he says, in effect, that Liz Fowler’s running Medicare’s Medicaid Services (CMS) Innovation Center, (CMMI) demonstrates how rotten and corrupted our government has become. I hope you’ll watch the video (it’s a few seconds more than five minutes). But if you cannot follow that link, let me quote from the website encapsulating it: ( https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/05/obamacare-fowler-lobbyist-industry1 ) “It's difficult to find someone who embodies the sleazy, anti-democratic, corporatist revolving door that greases Washington as shamelessly and purely as Liz Fowler.”

When Fowler wasn’t in government formulating healthcare policy, she worked as a lobbyist for two of our country’s biggest healthcare giants — WellPoint (now Anthem) and Johnson & Johnson. When fashioning Obamacare, she made sure that the “public option” was not included, because her point of view prioritizes private insurance and corporate money. When she came on board the CMMI, there had already been established Medicare (dis)Advantage (MA), a privatized approach which skimps on our medical care to fatten the wallets of Wall Street and finds ways to defraud the government. Bad as that is, at least it does not deny us the choice of going with Traditional Medicare (TM). But Fowler’s newest concoction, ACO REACH, tries to do just that. It doesn’t recruit you; it bypasses you and recruits your doctor, thus subjecting you — without your full knowledge or consent — to the not-so-tender mercies of a business which is allowed to keep as profit as much as 40 percent of what it doesn’t spend on your care. Fowler’s stated aim was to get every senior in the country into privatized Medicare by 2030.

You may ask, how can CMMI justify an approach which worsens healthcare and pays the resulting “profits” to Wall Street?

In a blistering article ( https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/06/07/liz-fowler-is-back-and-shes-writing-us-health-policy-again/ ) Kay Tillow says “CMMI’s work is based on the wrong-headed theory that U.S. healthcare is too expensive because of overuse [emphasis mine] … too many doctors and hospitals are giving too much care … CMMI … is constructed around insurance company magical thinking of health care reform: cut costs while giving less but better care.”

The fact that Fowler is in defensive mode is a result of a widespread public outcry. Now is our great chance to redouble our protests, to contact our representatives — at every level. State representatives have received contributions from pharmaceutical/medical interests whose main local interest is that the New York Health Act not be passed. So not only our federal reps, but our state reps must pledge not to accept such donations. Even local representatives need to be reminded that to us, profits are not more important than people. Shall we sell off to a bottling company the rights to the water in Cooper Lake? Shall we build a power plant close to where people are living? Such questions have occurred here before!

We must demand that everyone of whatever level speak out against ACO REACH; we must demand that they pledge not to accept any donations from pharmaceutical/medical interests or corporate interests. Tell all of them that you’re sick and tired of business as usual in Washington, D.C.

As Bill Moyers says, “Don’t just get mad. Get busy!”

Paul R. Cooper

Kingston