PSARA is very pleased to welcome back Dr. Ed Weisbart. Earlier this year, Dr. Weisbart, a PSARA member, presented a brilliant webinar provid-ing information that helped inform us of the very significant threat to public Medicare posed by large corporations and Wall Street. 

     Now Dr. Weisbart returns to provide us with additional information that has been revealed since his first webinar, as well as strategies that are develop-ing to win this battle. He describes the webinar as follows: 

     The effort to understand and reverse the corporate takeover of Medicare is critical to both present Medicare ben-eficiaries and all who look forward to benefiting from Medicare in the future.

     Insurance corporations have figured out how to funnel staggering sums of money into their own pockets by misus-ing and abusing the Medicare system, callously delaying and denying the life-saving health care Medicare beneficia-ries need and deserve.

And it’s about to ramp up again. Our TVs are already getting inundated with the deceptively misnamed “Medicare Advantage.” It’s not really Medicare, and the “advantages” mainly go to the insurance corporations’ bottom lines. It should really be called Medicare DIS-Advantage for the rest of us.

     Physicians for a National Health Program, working closely with lots of great national allies and local commu-nity-based organizations, like PSARA, has been developing a comprehensive strategic plan to start to reclaim Medi-care from the profiteers. Just in time for Open Enrollment, the webinar will ad-dress how we can get our hands around this needlessly complex mess and make the best decisions for ourselves and our families as we unite to preserve and expand our public Medicare.

     Ed Weisbart, MD, is the national board secretary and MO chapter chair of Physicians for a National Health Program. PNHP is a non-profit, non-partisan organization of more than 25,000 physi-cians and other health care advocates in support of a publicly financed, non-profit single-payer national health insurance program that would fully cover medical care for all Americans. He chairs PNHP’s anti-Medicare-privatization steering com-mittee.

     He also serves as presi-dent of Consumers Council of Missouri, a non-profit organization that works to build a more inclusive and equitable community through advocacy, coalition building, collaboration, and community education. 

After practicing family medicine for 20 years at Rush Medical Center in Chicago, Dr. Weisbart moved to St. Louis in 2003 to serve as chief medical officer of Express Scripts until retiring in 2010. He worked as an assistant professor of clinical medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, from 2004 until retiring clinically in 2021.

     During 2023, a national movement has developed to wrest control of Medi-care from large insurers, Wall Street, and regulators in the Center for Medi-care and Medicaid Services who seem determined to privatize and profitize Medicare. We have a long way to go to win this battle, and we are challenging very powerful economic interests. 

     But the progress we have made this year to help build a national movement to preserve and expand public Medi-care has taken us further than we had dared to think could be done in such a short timeframe.

     Please join PSARA and Dr. Ed Weis-bart on September 13 at 5p.m. PT for 

what promises to be an outstanding webinar. 

     Registration is required. Click here to Register. 

     If you don't get emails from PSARA, contact organizer@psara.org to get on our email list and receive email notifica-tions for this and all our exciting PSARA events.

     If you would like to see Wendell Potter’s Previous PSARA webinars click on the links below: 

• “Pull-ing Back the Curtain: Lies, Fraud, and Naked Profiteering in Medicare Privati-zation Schemes.” 

• “Don’t Let Naked Profiteering Destroy Our Medicare.”