Part D Deadline Approaches
Part D Deadline Approaches
It's only 20 days until May 15th - the last day for senior citizens and persons with disabilities to enroll in the new Part D drug benefit. For those who miss this arbitrary deadline and decide to enroll later, they will face permanent financial penalties - at least a 7% increase (and much higher for some) in their premiums for the rest of their lives.
President Bush won't agree to a deadline for withdrawing troops from Iraq but he continues to insist on an artificial deadline that could cost up to 10 million senior citizens and disabled people dearly. He's sticking with the Part D deadline even when 71% of the senior citizens and Medicare advocates around the country want it extended.
Once again, the President claims that the facts are on his side even though the reality points in the opposite direction. He claims that over 30 million Medicare beneficiaries have enrolled in Part D but doesn't acknowledge that 75% of them already had coverage through retiree plans, the VA, or private insurance. As of April 18, the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation ( www.kff.org) reports that 13.4 million senior citizens and persons with disabilities across the country (555,074 in Illinois) still haven't signed up. And he glosses over the finding that over 1 in 4 of those who have enrolled say they are paying more for their drugs than they did before.
He says the early chaos was just a temporary glitch and that Part D is now working well. But, as Robert Pear writes in The New York Times, ("Deadline Near, Jams Are Seen for Drug Plan," 4/24/06), a federal contractor looking into the performance of the Part D private insurance company call centers found that many are not meeting federal standards. What a surprise that the Bush administration is keeping the contractor's report secret and won't agree to disclose it to the public - the same public being asked to enroll in those plans - until close to the May 15 th deadline (when it will be too late to be of any use).
In that same article, Pear reports another problem that the Bush Administration is ignoring: information on the Medicare website - information provided by the private insurance industry - isn't accurate. You and I may not be surprised but the senior citizens and persons with disabilities who enrolled in plans based on that information may have a huge shock in store when they find out.
I remember when President Bush was asked in a press conference to name a mistake that he had made and he couldn't come up with one. He now has a perfect reponse: the Part D Disaster. The May 15 deadline is a mistake. A prescription drug benefit that relies solely on private insurers and prohibits Medicare from negotiating for discounts like the VA is a whopper of a mistake. And, if we let the Bush Administration and Republican Congress keep us from fixing it, that will be the biggest mistake of all.
I have introduced two bills to fix the Medicare Part D mess. The Medicare Informed Choice Act, which I introduced with Congressman Pete Stark, would extend the deadline by six months and ensure that beneficiaries are able to switch plans once in case their formularies change or they find a better plan.
I have also introduced the Medicare Prescription Drug Savings and Choice Act, with Congressmen Marion Berry and Tom Allen, which would require that Medicare negotiate for lower prices, just like the VA does. According to a report by the Democratic Staff on the House Government Reform Committee, this type of benefit could save Chicagoans about 80%. It would also be uniform and avoid the confusion that the dozens of private plans have caused. This is the true fix to the President's Part D disaster.
http://www.janschakowsky.org/SchaBLOGsky/tabid/36/Default.aspx