So my personal opinion is that Medicare Advantage plans are only good for two things. 1–to hold down costs for those who are on Medicare due to a disabilty and are not eligible for either Medicaid or a Medicare Supplement plan. 2. to control costs for those who are such low iincome that they can't afford a supplement, but are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. Unfortunately, in the latter case, many folks are going to find out that they would have a lower out of pocket cost by simply using a high deductible Medicare Supplement.

As for the gag order itself, although I'm not a fan of the plans, I support the right of all agencies to express their concerns. And the order of silence–whether you want to call it gag or something else–is definitely a mark of desperation on the part of this administration. They want to ram something through onto the American people because they know that once they get it through it will be difficult to reverse it. The Dems only care about getting nationalized health care. They don't care how many jobs it will cost or how much will be required in taxes. After all, they are insulated from the struggles of the real American people. It's high time that was changed.

The Supreme Court has said the First Amendment protects the free speech rights of businesses like Humana even when they are government contractors, in cases like Board of County Commissioners v. Umbehr, 518 U.S. 668 (1996).

Liberal supporters of the gag order hypocritically claim Humana should shut up because it’s receiving federal funds (an argument they would never make regarding artists funded by the National Endowment for the Arts), and because its claims are supposedly false (even though its claims are truthful and are echoed by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, which is headed by Democrat Douglas Elmendorf).

But as Professor Volokh and the Washington Supreme Court have recently noted, “false statements of fact about the government are generally protected” by the First Amendment.

Humana’s statements are predictions about the future, and thus by definition not provably false. Moreover, they are chillingly accurate predictions, which is why Obama ally Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), who is drafting Obama’s health-care plan, asked Obama to ban them, as the Wall Street Journal notes:

“On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office director told Mr. Baucus’s committee that its plan to cut $123 billion from Medicare Advantage—the program that gives almost one-fourth of seniors private health-insurance options—will result in lower benefits and some 2.7 million people losing this coverage. Imagine that. Last week Mr. Baucus ordered Medicare regulators to investigate and likely punish Humana Inc. for trying to educate enrollees in its Advantage plans about precisely this fact.”

The fact that Humana is a government contractor doesn’t make this censorship any more acceptable, since the government simply has no business policing criticism of itself as “false”: federal courts have ruled that even false speech by government contractors and employees on matters of public concern can be protected, as cases like Johnson v. Multnomah County, 48 F.3d 420 (9th Cir. 1995) show.

Nor is there any evidence that Humana is using federal money to disseminate its message. And any subsidies Humana might be receiving would not justify the Obama Administration’s blatant viewpoint discrimination against it, since Obama allies that receive lots of federal subsidies are being allowed to trumpet their support for ObamaCare freely. Under the Supreme Court’s ruling in Rosenberger v. Rector of the University of Virginia, viewpoint discrimination is a forbidden, “egregious” form of discrimination even when the government is subsidizing a speaker; here, the federal government is plainly engaging in viewpoint discrimination, since it is letting AARP make blatantly false claims in favor of ObamaCare that contradict CBO findings and basic budget math, while blocking Humana from criticizing ObamaCare based on reasonable arguments echoed by the Congressional Budget Office).

I don't give my account to XCel, or Verizon, or Health Partners so they can solicit me on political issues. And if they're using medical patient information, those records require high levels of privacy and security. Company management should not have the right to use those records to pursue their personal political goals. If a senior disagrees, should they fear the company will treat them worse than someone who does agree with company management.

If the mailers are bulk-mail resident pieces, I'm with the Republicans. But if the seniors they contact are their own clients I think that is problematic.