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-- Programs and Services -- Contact Information The sad truth about Medicare “reform”
The Medicare law that the Bush Administration and the House Republican leadership forced through Congress last year is masquerading as a prescription drug benefit, but people are seeing the legislation for what it is — a blatant effort to force seniors into HMOs, a shameful giveaway to the drug companies and the private insurance industry, and a drug benefit that is maximum confusion and minimum relief for seniors from the astronomical prices of prescription drugs.
The story of the Medicare bill’s passage is a tale of thinly-veiled coercion and outright deception. But more shameful still is the substance of the law itself.
Last year, President Bush announced that only senior citizens in HMOs should receive a prescription drug benefit, and the new law privatizes Medicare by stealth. It creates a $12 billion slush fund to entice private insurance companies to compete with genuine Medicare. It even pays private plans a bonus of 15% to provide exactly the same health services as Medicare. If, as the Bush Administration claims, private plans are more efficient than Medicare, why do they need these massive government subsidies?
The answer is self-evident. Since the program’s earliest days, the Republican Party has wanted Medicare to “wither on the vine,” as Newt Gingrich once said. With Republicans in control of both the White House and Congress for the first time in half a century, they seized the opportunity. The new law takes a major step toward that long-cherished aim through a destructive program called “premium support.” Instead of Medicare’s fundamental guarantee of health care coverage, up to six million seniors will face health care premiums dictated by private insurance companies with no promise of fairness or affordability.
The Medicare law has so many giveaways that there’s not enough money left for a decent drug benefit. Including premiums, a senior who spends $500 a year for prescriptions will actually pay more for the new drug “benefit” than they are spending now. Seniors with costs of up to $5,000 a year receive only minor discounts.
The sad truth is that seniors would get a better deal simply taking the bus to Canada, but the Bush Administration won’t allow safe reimportation of pharmaceuticals. The Administration is all for free trade when it comes to shipping jobs to India - but not when it comes to safely importing cheaper drugs from Canada and Europe.
The new law panders so heavily to the pharmaceutical industry that it even stops Medicare from negotiating with pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices.
Negotiation with drug companies has lowered prescription prices at the Veterans’ Administration and in every other industrialized nation, but thanks to the Bush Administration, seniors won’t get similar cost reductions.
The Bush Medicare law is so deeply flawed that it demands massive corrections. It deserves to be scrapped and replaced. Only then can we restore the integrity of the Medicare that seniors have known and trusted and loved for almost 40 years.