Creating a Better Life For Seniors

Protecting Your Future-2026 Retirement Revolution

• Bill • Season 1 • Episode 2

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0:00 | 21:44

Protecting Your Future-2026 Retirement Revolution

NRLN & AREF: Protecting Retiree Benefits and Fighting Medicare Privatization in 2026

In this 2026 podcast episode, Bill Kadereit of the National Retiree Legislative Network (NRLN) and the American Retiree Education Foundation (AREF) explains that NRLN is a nonpartisan 501(c)(4) representing over 2 million seniors from about 300 companies and public entities across all states, advocating to protect pensions, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and reduce prescription drug costs, funded primarily by member contributions without corporate or large-donor money. He describes AREF as a separately financed 501(c)(3) producing research and position papers on issues including pension risk transfers, Medicare guarantee rights, and retiree protections in mergers and bankruptcies. Kadereit argues Congress is highly partisan and has ignored long-known funding challenges as population growth slows and seniors grow as a share of the population, and he highlights senior voter power. He details NRLN’s Action Alert system on NRLN.org to help members contact elected officials, and warns Medicare Advantage subsidies raise costs, citing higher per-enrollee costs, large rebates, and privatization risks, urging support for NRLN.

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro
00:34 NRLN Mission and Reach
01:18 Funding and AREF Overview
02:06 AREF Research and Protections
02:52 Partisan Politics and Retiree Risks
03:33 Are Benefits Guaranteed
04:08 Congress Short-Term Thinking
05:54 Senior Voting Power
06:50 How to Fight Back
07:11 Action Alerts and Joining
09:55 Long-Term Underfunding Warning
10:47 Population Charts and Aging Trends
13:18 Medicare Costs and High Utilizers
14:06 Medicare Advantage Subsidies
15:28 Privatization Concerns
17:04 Wrap Up and Next Episodes

Mike Roth ai7:

Welcome to our 2026 podcast series. Let's start by introducing our

Mike Roth ai5:

guest from

Mike Roth ai7:

the National Retiree Legislative Network, NRLN, and American Retiree Education Foundation, AREF.

Mike Roth ai5:

Bill Kadereit . Bill

Mike Roth ai7:

tell us a little bit about

Mike Roth ai5:

both.

Bill Kadereit:

N R L N is a 5 0 1 C four non-profit Mike, a nonpartisan organization representing over 2 million seniors, age 55 or over. And our members , come from about 300 different companies and public entities. They span the, and reside over 50 states and 75% of the congressional districts in our country. They advocate to protect pensions, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and lower your prescription drug costs.

Mike Roth ai7:

Bill, why don't you tell us what the mission of the organizations are?

Bill Kadereit:

The mission basically is predicated on those things that mean the most to retirees. We advocate to protect pensions, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and lower prescription drug costs.

Mike Roth ai7:

Bill, how are you funded?

Bill Kadereit:

We're funded primarily by contributions for members. We do not receive any other money from corporations, insurance companies of any kind or large donors. Our entire budget comes from membership support, Mike.

Mike Roth ai7:

That's good. Tell us a little bit more about the A R E F.

Bill Kadereit:

the 5 0 1 C3 nonprofit. A R E F prepares research papers and position papers for public education. Funding for that organization comes from tax deductible donations, and those donations also come primarily from individuals of our organization who do contribute in some cases, actually part of their IRA distributions. And from other sources, we receive very little money, particularly people in the healthcare industry do not contribute at all to us.

Mike Roth ai7:

What other kinds of things that, that you deliver for that kind of money?

Bill Kadereit:

The A R E F is involved in research and they affiliate with a number of other organizations that also do research on income security and Medicare protections. They protect beneficiaries from companies de-risking their plans, what we call pension risk transfers or PRTs. We try to enforce Medicare guarantee rights that protect people who lose their coverage. Unbeknownst to them when a insurance company terminates or non-renew their policies. We also have a white paper on protecting retirees and mergers spinoffs in bankruptcies. The organizations are separately financed, and I serve as President of the NRN and chairman of the A R E F.

Mike Roth ai7:

Tell us a little bit about the political environment that we exist in today and the power that voters have. How do these organizations function for retirees?

Bill Kadereit:

Primarily in, in government, of course, we have the legislative and the executive branches, and Congress has become highly partisan and frankly, if nothing else, anti retiree. You hear a lot about what they're promising, but they seem to never deliver anything that has stabilized the economic position or income of retirees. And you hear about healthcare performance and reductions in costs they're not there. And so primarily we've lost a great deal of attention on the national stage.

Mike Roth ai5:

Are, Mike Roth ai7: all the currently have guaranteed?

Bill Kadereit:

Those covered by , the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, (E R I S A ) protect those over age 65 when they have. Defined benefit pensions. But we represent people that are 65 plus. We also represent people that are under age 65. And a big issue there, of course, is even planning for retirement. There, there's very little evidence that people have enough money to retire. And so I don't think if you look across the board that retirees get very good service there and there's need for an improved savings mechanisms.

Mike Roth ai7:

Do we have a kind of disconnect in Congress between the needs of retirees and what they're doing?

Bill Kadereit:

Yeah, sure. Politicians think on a two year or six year cycle. Members of the house are elected for two years and members of the Senate are elected for six years. And the seniors though, have to plan the rest of their lives and for their children and grandchildren. So the perception is entirely different. It's easy to duck an issue when, you're on the job for just two years and you're gone. It's not so easy if you have 25 years left to go and you're wondering how much money you're going to have in the till when you retire, and how your kids are gonna fear down the road.

Mike Roth ai7:

Or how you're gonna fear.

Bill Kadereit:

Absolutely.

Mike Roth ai7:

Yeah. Now, what's been happening in Congress and the executive branch that puts our pensions, our social security, our Medicare at risk.

Bill Kadereit:

I would say there's been an awful lot of political rhetoric. There's too much infighting. What do we hear on TV? And what do we see in on TV every day? It's somebody is hollering and calling someone else up to be, chastised in front of a committee for doing something on a personal basis. There's more of that going on than there is problem solving. And you've matched that with the amount of over the top campaign contributions coming from industrial organizations such as the healthcare insurance industry. And you have a Congress that gets compromised and very many people in Congress today really are there to do the job. They were, they took an oath for. To do. And

Mike Roth ai7:

you mean very few people are there?

Bill Kadereit:

Very few of them of course, do that kind of a job that they took the oath for. Examples are of course funding Social Security and funding Medicare. It's just outrageous what how Congress has kicked the can down the road. Mike Roth ai7: Now, what is the Yeah, it's very interesting. In, in the last presidential election, 65 million voters rage 55 to 65. That was 40% of all votes cast in that election of 166 million votes. 41% of them were between 55 and 65. Another 42 million voters were over age, 65, 20 9%. So combined 110 million or 66% of all voters. We're cast by seniors 55 years and older. The seniors in this country need to wake up to the fact that they're about to lose their Medicare. They're about to be challenged every time there's a presidential election about this two fundamental programs that are mandatorily funded. That means the Congress shouldn't walk away from a mandatory obligation, but they do.

Mike Roth ai7:

How do you think, the, and our National Retirees Legislative Network members should fight back

Bill Kadereit:

Well today. There are several ways they can do it. Many attend town hall meetings where they live. They belong to the NRLN, and we are their advocate. We work hard on the issues that are very important to them. And so we use what's called an Action Alert system. Which is an email to our grassroots members asking them to make direct contact with their personal elected representatives in Washington to send a message to them on a particular issue, such as Social Security, Medicare and Rx drugs. Members, send personal emails to us Senators. Representatives, federal agencies, and the President, in fact.

Mike Roth ai7:

Now, is that system through your website?

Bill Kadereit:

Absolutely.

Mike Roth ai7:

So that the member who wants to contact the representatives in Congress or the president directly can create the message through your website and they don't have to bother looking up the addresses, finding a stand, taking it

Bill Kadereit:

to the envelope. Absolutely. We have a system available. Where our members can go up and construct their own message, their own representative, and send it by themselves. In addition to that, when we suggest that they take action and we present them with a message they can send to their elected representatives, they have the ability to edit it, to personalize it.

Mike Roth ai7:

So we have a, a system that retirees have a simple method to contact their representatives about issues which will affect them in their pocketbooks.

Bill Kadereit:

Absolutely.

Mike Roth ai7:

Retirement income. Yeah. From social security or pensions. Sure. And the cost of Medicare and drugs.

Bill Kadereit:

Absolutely. It's available 24 7 365 days a year. On the website, they have the access and all they simply do is go up and. Click on NRLN.org and go into the legislative agenda Action Alert, and they can pick any action alert, or they can create their own message and send it to their elected representatives. And they can talk with their friends and their neighbors and they can all converse and decide, yeah, this is an important issue. We'd like to use that vehicle. And so they sign up and become members of the NRLN and have that access.

Mike Roth ai7:

So joining the NLRN. Yeah. Is that done on the website?

Bill Kadereit:

Absolutely.

Mike Roth ai7:

And

Bill Kadereit:

NRLN.org

Mike Roth ai7:

NRLN.org?

Bill Kadereit:

That's correct.

Mike Roth ai7:

Very simple. Everyone should do it. And you don't have to be 65 to do it, do you?

Bill Kadereit:

Oh, no. You better start doing it 55 because you're still in the most savings mode. And what. Don't see coming down the road will become visible to you, and so you do a better job of planning ahead for your own financial success.

Mike Roth ai7:

As you see it, who is this podcast dedicated to?

Bill Kadereit:

It's dedicated really to the hardworking people who are our grassroots members, because they can be most influential. Back home with their members of Congress and congressmen and senators are concerned about what they have to say. It's just that they don't do much about it.

Mike Roth ai7:

Bill? What are the indicators? Of what politicians should have been doing over the past 55 years regarding Medicare and social security?

Bill Kadereit:

It is a proven fact that Congress and the Executive branch of the government of the United States have been well aware that these plans could be underfunded over time because they had the data. They had the census reports, they had the trustees reports of all, all these programs, and they saw you can visually see that years back when they didn't fund kick the can down the road and to protect themselves as being viewed as supporting a tax increase. They basically ignored the reality of financial calculations that someday these reserves will be zero. And we've reached that point.

Mike Roth ai7:

I guess at this point we wanna show our listeners a chart. Okay, that compares the 2020 census total population and growth rate. And Bill, why don't you explain what our listeners are seeing on the chart now?

Bill Kadereit:

Sure. The population grows, as you can tell. About 26 million from 2025 out through 2050 on this chart, and it's growing slowly at a constant rate that is much lower, however than the prior years. If you look at 2020, for example, it grew at 3.4% from previous year. This is total population. So the total population is growing slowly, because as you can see from that orange line there,

Mike Roth ai7:

that's the population growth, the

Bill Kadereit:

orange line, that's the population growth rate, and it shows that from 2025 out through 2050, it's well below 2% a year, which is less than half. The growth rate that is that we've seen prior to 2025. And so naturally the population is shrinking and so seniors became a larger and larger percent of the population. And so that's a very important factor. Now, when you look at this second chart,

Mike Roth ai7:

let's bring up the second chart.

Bill Kadereit:

You can see the components of this chart and you can see from it the baby boomers in orange out in 2015 were 24.1% of the population, 78 million people. And everyone say the baby boomers are the biggest problem going on here. In fact, they're really not anymore because by 2028 were the two lines, the blue line and the orange line cross. All baby boomers in the United States of America will be over age 65 and in Medicare, that presents even with the slow growth, the growth in population, and the large growth in the number of people over age 65. Moving forward, you can see the population in the blue chart, blue lines and the blue stacks. Grows by 23.9%. While the baby boomers shrink down to 5% out in 2050, the phenomenon there that's happening you can't really see is that the people in orange or people over age 65 in orange and the, people who are baby boomers are now older and they consume a great deal, more of the Medicare services and the cost. Mike, I think it would surprise people to learn that. 80% of every dollar spent for healthcare by the government is spent on only 25% of the people in Medicare over 65 . So 25% of the people consume 80% of the cost to the our budget. Our Congress has known this for 15 or 16 years, and they've done nothing about it. They knew that the cost per enrollee, the cost per headcount in people over age 65 was gonna be a major problem. And yet they resisted and did not fund these plans, and now they have to pay a price one way or the other. They're going to have to increase taxes or they're going to have to make radical changes and they should not do it to benefits. Okay.

Mike Roth ai7:

I thought our government is sold out to higher cost insurance companies. So now our taxpayers are paying 20% more than they need to.

Bill Kadereit:

That's exactly right. If you look at the privatization of Medicare today, that has occurred, the government payments to Medicare private plans, also known as Medicare Advantage Plans, has subsidized the American insurance companies to the point where now 16% of every dollar paid to them. It covers their entire overhead and profit, and that today, the cost per enrollee in these private plans is 20% higher than the cost in original Medicare, and it's costing $89 billion a year in subsidies called rebates that go to insurance companies that are unwarranted. And if they're looking for more money to fund these plans, there's a hundred billion dollars. Mike.

Mike Roth ai7:

How much money did you

Bill Kadereit:

spend? A hundred billion dollars almost a year. In two years. The latest budget, in 2025, projected a deficit loss of $3.4 trillion over the next 10 years. 1.2 trillion of that 3.4 trillion is increases in rebates paid to insurance companies big hole that's 20% deeper than our fee for service would be.

Mike Roth ai7:

Why are our representatives politicians agreeing to pay all this money to insurance companies?

Bill Kadereit:

They're agreeing to do it because they wanna privatize Medicare. They do not want the federal budget to have Medicare on its books. You will hear some people say, oh, we're not gonna cut your benefits. But what they're not saying is, we're just going to kill Medicare.

Mike Roth ai7:

Yeah. They're not gonna cut your benefits today.

Bill Kadereit:

That's right.

Mike Roth ai7:

But tomorrow we're gonna kill 'em

Bill Kadereit:

Tomorrow. The whole plan goes We'll, never cut your benefits one at a time. We're just gonna take the whole plan out from under you.

Mike Roth ai7:

That's that. That would be terrible. That would mean people would have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for

Bill Kadereit:

Absolutely. In this case, just a simple comparison here. They'd have to make up the difference in that 20% loss already. They'd have to make up the difference over the next 10 years for a $1.2 trillion loss, increased deficit just because of those rebates. And the problem is that after 54 years. They now have 55% market share. And when initially they planned and promised that if they could gain market share, they would show us how they would reduce costs in Medicare. Just give us these subsidies, give us these rebates, and we'll show you it's failed, it's over. The real problem is will our elected officials and our executives in this country and the government have the guts to tell the insurance companies. You can continue compete all you want to. We want you to compete, but not with taxpayer money. No more rebates.

Mike Roth ai7:

So that, that really should be the,

Bill Kadereit:

that's a

Mike Roth ai7:

first thing. That

Bill Kadereit:

big issue. Mike.

Mike Roth ai7:

Is there anything else, Bill, that you want to tell our listeners during this? For full episode.

Bill Kadereit:

Yeah I think watch out in the future for our podcast regarding social security, Medicare, Medicaid funding and the cost of prescription drugs, much of what we just talked about in Social Security and Medicaid funding, and is the center of the future presentations. And so you'll want to call back to this presentation, this episode. Finally as the ending of this podcast, please support the NRN and do it quickly because we have a big job ahead of us. We appreciate you very much and we'll see you next time. Thanks again, Bill.

Mike Roth ai7:

We are gonna be back in two weeks with another episode, so look for us again.