Medicare drug bill is fatally flawed

While I greatly appreciate the work Sen. Olympia Snowe has done on behalf of Maine seniors, I believe her op-ed commentary (BDN, Dec. 18) failed to present some of the fatal flaws in the recently passed Medicare prescription drug bill, flaws that make this bill a worse deal for seniors than no bill at all. This legislation is a difficult pill for Maine seniors to swallow, one that not only provides little new help, but also could jeopardize their existing health care coverage. Furthermore, since the program will not begin until 2006, what little good it might do would not even start to help Maine seniors for years to come.

Sen. Snowe was correct when she noted, “… for too long, too many of our seniors have been threatened with financial ruin because of skyrocketing drug costs.” But the real culprit in high prescription prices is the prescription drug company, and this bill steers far clear of doing anything that would impact their bottom line. In fact, this legislation specifically protects high prices in a massive give away to pharmaceutical companies. Their estimated increased profits under this bill are $139 billion over eight years, that’s 34.7 percent of the $400 billion this legislation will cost. This is what special interest money can do when lobbying efforts are successful.

The authors of this legislation bent under pressure from the drug companies and included a provision that prohibits the secretary of Health and Human Services from ever negotiating for lower cost prescriptions. Instead of taking a historic opportunity to make prescriptions more affordable, this legislation allows seniors to be held hostage by pharmaceutical interests, who will continue to drive up the cost of prescriptions in the name of company income. While seniors are rationing the very medicines they need to survive. Year after year pharmaceutical companies see astronomical profits, this is simply wrong.

Sen. Snowe also describes potential benefits for low-income seniors, but fails to mention that this plan includes an assets test that would make many low-income seniors ineligible for any low-income assistance. Modest assets such as a burial plot could push as many as 18,500 seniors in Maine past these low-income guidelines. It has been further estimated that over 40,000 of Maine’s Medicaid beneficiaries will pay more for their prescription drugs under this legislation. This is a terrible deal for poorer Maine seniors.

This legislation also includes a heavy push toward Medicare privatization. Because the authors of this plan dearly hope to privatize Medicare as soon as possible. They have allowed private plans to compete with Medicare through this bill and then stacked the deck to help out the private plans by giving them $17 billion in subsidies from the American taxpayer. This provision alone could raise Part B Medicare premiums for some beneficiaries by as much as 88 percent

These problems are only the tip of the iceberg. This legislation creates a large coverage gap that will cause Maine seniors to pay thousands of dollars out of their pockets. It also jeopardizes employee-sponsored retiree prescription coverage, one of the only current sources of drug coverage for today’s seniors, and could force as many as 14,000 Maine seniors out of their high quality medical coverage and into an inferior plan. Perhaps the most callous provision in the entire bill is the measure that makes the largest cut in history for cancer care in Medicare, more than $10 billion. This means there will be at least a 10 percent cut in cancer reimbursements next year.

One notion that we can all agree on is that this plan is not the end; the fight has only just begun. We at the Maine Council of Senior Citizens will work to establish an affordable and comprehensive Medicare benefit, and look forward to working with Sen. Snowe as well as those who spoke up against this legislation to improve its many flaws.

John Carr, of York, is president of the Maine Council of Senior Citizens, affiliated with the Alliance for Retired Americans.