AARP: Seniors’ Lobby or Insurance Company?

Washington, D.C. – Washington is full of special interest groups whose reputations make them formidable participants in the ongoing battle over what the government should be doing.

Among the most powerful of these groups is AARP. Formerly the American Association of Retired Persons, it has, over the years, been transformed into a network of well-informed, politically active seniors who vote and who can be provoked into entering the fray whenever they can be made to believe their benefits are threatened.

This makes them a group to be feared. No one wants to cross AARP, at least not politically. Few have lived to tell the tale. That makes the group a powerful voice on issues related to health care and other subjects of concern to the elderly.

It's time, though, to start asking whether AARP's vaunted reputation is grounded in reality or if it's just hype.

How AARP Puts Profits over Patients and Principles – a reported issue by the nonprofit group American Commitment as part of its Commitment to Seniors initiative says the group isn't a genuine grassroots lobby organization. Instead, its considerable ties to the health insurance industry make it something akin to a corporate influence operation considered useful by business interests trying to sway the decisions of lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

According to the report, AARP has acted numerous times in ways that create an apparent conflict of interest between companies like United Health, whose royalty payments to the organization are by far its largest source of revenue, outstripping what it gets in membership dues and the needs of the people the group claims to represent.

It was, for instance, one of the groups pushing Congress to enact the Inflation Reduction Act, a trillion-dollar spending measure that included provisions helpful to the health insurance industry but overall damaging to Medicare's long-term financial security.

That doesn't sound like something a seniors' lobby should be doing. Yet the group is alleged to have spent millions on paid ads in support of the legislation and conducted more than 80 events and numerous petition drives, almost solely for the benefit of congressional Democrats who were backing the measure's cap on the price of prescription drugs.

“If AARP were an honest broker for seniors, they would have acknowledged, and likely fought against, Democrats' budgeting ruse allowing them to raid $280 billion from the supposed Medicare savings in the IRA,” economist Stephen Moore recently wrote in National Review. “Billions were instead diverted to fund subsidies for non-Medicare healthcare policies paid to big insurers.”

Critics of price controls on pharmaceuticals also say they will discourage future industry research and innovations, setting off a chain of events that will cause the quality of care available to seniors to diminish over coming years.

All this, American Commitment President Phil Kerpen said, “provides further evidence that AARP does not serve the interests of seniors, but rather its principal funders, UnitedHealth and its subsidiary OptumRx—respectively the largest health insurance company in the country and a pharmacy middleman.”

Accusing AARP of having made “its allegiance to these companies clear,” Kerpen goes on to decry the group's support for legislation that siphoned “billions of dollars from seniors' Medicare to subsidize big health insurers and liberal spending priorities.”

What is not widely known is that AARP's internal polling shows the cost of health insurance premiums, the size of deductibles and copays and other out-of-pocket expenses are identified by close to three-quarters of seniors as the biggest financial issue they face in health care. Less than 20 percent said it was the price of prescription drugs which, it should come as no surprise, is a major concern for the insurance companies.

Congress has investigated AARP's financial relationship with big insurance on more than one occasion without reaching any conclusions. It should do so again, in its own interests as well as the public's. Unless it does, we all run the risk of legislative and regulatory actions being pushed through Congress and the Executive Branch under the guise of helping America's seniors, which hurt them. AARP members have a right to know what's going on. So does Congress and so do we all. It's a matter of trust.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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