# Mehmet Oz — "Stabilizing the market so this bailout is no longer needed" > [!quote] "We are stabilizing the market so this bailout is no longer needed." > — Mehmet Oz, CMS Administrator, post on X, July 28, 2026 ## Context On July 28, 2026, [[CMS]] released preliminary Part D bid information for contract year 2027 and announced, in the same fact sheet, that it would end the **Part D Premium Stabilization Demonstration** at the close of CY 2026 — a year earlier than the program had been expected to run. The demonstration was a voluntary arrangement, implemented for CY 2025, that paid standalone prescription drug plans to hold down premiums while the [[Inflation Reduction Act]]'s Part D redesign — including the $2,000 annual out-of-pocket cap — took effect. CMS's stated rationale was that plan sponsors now had "sufficient experience under the redesigned Part D benefit," so the program would "return to operating under traditional market conditions in CY 2027." The move was first reported by the [[Wall Street Journal]] and confirmed by the agency the same day. Oz posted the defense on X. His full thread went further than the sentence above: - "Premiums will go up by less than $10 for most Medicare recipients, with many even seeing LOWER premiums." - "Every Medicare beneficiary still has access to low-cost plans, and we will continue to lower prescription drug prices for every American patient, from more MFN deals to our policy giving seniors access to GLP-1s for $50 a month" — a reference to the [[Most-Favored-Nation Drug Pricing Deals]]. The word doing the work is **bailout**. It reframes a subsidy whose beneficiaries are enrollees — the payment flows to insurers, but its function is premium suppression — as a corporate rescue, which makes ending it an act of fiscal discipline rather than a cost shift. Administration officials simultaneously blamed the IRA itself for the premium instability the demonstration was created to absorb. ## Why this matters The claim is checkable, and the numbers around it are not obviously friendly to it. CMS's own fact sheet set the 2027 national average monthly bid amount at **$296.05**, roughly a 24 percent jump. About 25 million people are in standalone Part D plans; enrollment rose from 22.8 million in 2024 to 24.9 million in 2026 while average monthly premiums fell by $26 in 2025 and $16 in 2026. KFF put the current subsidized average standalone premium near $36 a month and estimated that ending the demonstration could raise some premiums by as much as $20. An administration official told ABC News that about half of enrollees would see either an increase under $10 or a decrease. On **August 4, 2026**, fifty-one House Democrats led by Rep. Chris Pappas of New Hampshire wrote to Oz demanding immediate reversal, asserting that roughly 75 percent of current enrollees are likely to see costs rise and asking CMS to produce the analysis behind its claim that insurers no longer need the payments. Governor Kathy Hochul and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand warned of increases up to 40 percent for New York enrollees. The actual 2027 premiums will not be known until CMS releases the Part D and Medicare Advantage landscape in mid-to-late September 2026 — after which the numbers will land inside the midterm campaign. The structural stake sits one layer down. Standalone Part D plans are the drug-coverage option for people who stay in traditional Medicare. Raising those premiums while [[Medicare Advantage]] plans continue to bundle drug coverage pushes enrollment toward Part C — the outcome [[Project 2025]] proposes to reach directly by making Medicare Advantage the default. See [[Medicare Part D]]. ## Verification - **Attribution**: The sentence is quoted directly by ABC News (Michelle Stoddart and Arthur Jones II, July 29, 2026), which identifies it as a post on X by Oz and quotes two adjacent sentences from the same thread. The underlying post is DrOzCMS status 2082217750374834270. - **Sourcing note**: The wording here is taken from ABC News's reporting of the post rather than from the post itself; X is not directly retrievable through this vault's fetch tooling. Multiple outlets and a Snopes fact check reproduce the same sentence identically, and the policy claim it defends is confirmed by the CMS fact sheet of the same date. - **Underlying action**: CMS, "Medicare Part D 2027 National Average Monthly Bid Amount Information," July 28, 2026 — the primary announcement of the demonstration's conclusion, the $296.05 NAMBA, and the $41.33 base beneficiary premium. ## Related quotes - [[Harry S. Truman - the health of this Nation is a national concern]] — the 1945 premise this inverts. - [[Lyndon B. Johnson - healing miracle of modern medicine]] — the 1965 enactment, sixty-one years earlier to the week. ## See also - [[Medicare Part D]] - [[Medicare Advantage]] - [[CMS]] - [[Mehmet Oz]] - [[Project 2025]] - [[Quotes Hub]]