Defending Health Care Options: A Healthy Ossipee Costs Less for All

No one in Ossipee should have to choose between filling a prescription and paying the electric bill, and no senior should be left with one insurance plan that doesn't even fit their needs. Health care here should be something families can count on, not something they have to fight for every single year.

Ossipee's population is one of the oldest in the state, and our poverty rate runs well above the state average. A large share of us rely on Medicare or Medicaid, sometimes both, for our health care. That coverage is getting harder to hold onto, not easier. This year, two of New Hampshire's Medicare Advantage carriers pulled out of the state entirely, citing rising costs and cuts to what the federal government pays them, and the plan many of our seniors here in Ossipee relied on disappeared right along with them. For a lot of families, that plan was the more affordable option with the most complete coverage, and it's simply gone. Rural areas like ours got hit hardest, because insurers see fewer patients and fewer local providers to build a network around, which makes it less profitable for them to stick around here compared to the state's cities. For many Ossipee seniors, what's left is falling back on regular Medicare, which isn't built with lower-income residents in mind. It comes with far fewer benefits built in, so people are left buying costly add-on coverage just to get care that used to come bundled together, and even then it often covers less. That's not a real choice. At the same time, Ossipee families on Medicaid now have to pay for coverage that used to be free, with new monthly premiums that can run as high as two hundred seventy dollars and prescription copays that have jumped by as much as 100 to 300 percent, whether they can afford it or not. For someone on a fixed income here, that adds up fast.

The Medicare Advantage cuts came from Washington, not Concord, so Morgan will push New Hampshire's congressional delegation to fight for the funding that keeps rural plans like ours viable. But she won't wait on Washington for the parts of this that Concord does control. She'll fight to roll back the new Medicaid premiums and cap copays at something families can actually manage, instead of quietly turning health coverage into another bill Ossipee's working families and seniors can't afford. She'll push back on new paperwork and work requirement hurdles that put people at risk of losing coverage over red tape, not eligibility. And she'll push the state Insurance Department to hold insurers to real standards, so rural counties like ours aren't always the first to lose options when the market shifts.

This is the same pattern we see everywhere else in Concord. Instead of asking big business and the wealthiest to pay their share, the state balances its budget by quietly shifting costs onto the people who can least afford them, our seniors, our working families, the people right here in Ossipee who depend on Medicaid and Medicare to see a doctor at all.