How can a health insurance plan offer increased benefits from one year to the next while simultaneously lowering premiums? Simple: Taxpayers pay the difference.

Such are the results from the “premium stabilization demonstration” — read: bailout — of the Medicare prescription drug program that the Biden administration announced this summer. While Kamala Harris, Biden’s putative successor, and Democrats will breathe a sigh of relief at the news of premium reductions, taxpayers will end up the losers from this costly giveaway to insurance companies.

The latest developments come as a consequence of the (misnamed) Inflation Reduction Act that Democrats passed in 2022. The richer benefits — a new cap on seniors’ out-of-pocket drug expenses, coverage of vaccines, etc. — coupled with structural changes to the Part D pharmaceutical benefit, would on their own lead to significant premium increases.

In fact, premiums for standalone Part D plans — that is, plans that only cover prescription drugs — rose by an estimated 21 percent from 2023 to 2024, and the number of plans and firms offering plans each dropped to all-time lows. When plans made their bids for 2025, the Centers for Medicare........

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