November 15, 2005

Bush’s prescription drug plan is forcing millions of seniors to become gymnasts.

They’re going to have jump through all sorts of hoops to get the benefit, and if they decide it’s too much trouble, they’ll get socked with penalties if they ever try to join the program again.

Rather than offer free prescription drugs to everyone, and having the government bargain bulk discounts with the pharmaceutical companies for the entire Medicaid and Medicare population, Bush is subsidizing the drug companies and forcing seniors, starting this week, to evaluate a whole range of different private plans.

And none of them is free. In fact, seniors will be shelling out about $3,600 a year, not counting premiums, for the first $5,100 in prescriptions in 2006. These plans will then pick up 95 percent of the costs of any additional drugs. (See AARP) Drug companies and health insurers love Bush’s plan. “It’s a kind of a gold rush,” said Jonathan Oberlander, author of “The Political Life of Medicare,” in an article on the AARP website.

But for seniors, it’s a tricky hoops course. Each senior (or the care-provider for that senior) will have to figure out which private plan is best.

More than two million of these seniors are mentally handicapped, according to a Congressional advisory study cited in The New York Times.

They’re not going to be competent to figure this out.

And it’s going to be difficult for almost everybody else.

For instance, I live in Dane County, Wisconsin, and there are eight private plans for people here to choose from. Medicare has put out a chart on the Internet comparing them, but it’s Greek to me.

A senior would have no way of knowing whether the drugs he or she needs are covered by those plans, or why one plan would be better than another.

And for people who can’t navigate the Internet--and many seniors, like my parents, cannot—it’s going to be next to impossible to gather all the relevant information.

Seniors, or their sons and daughters who care for them, are going to have to do hours and hours of research to try to figure this out. And they may not come up with the best answer.

Bush is causing an endless amount of anxiety for seniors who don’t know what to do right now.

They have enough anxiety in their lives already. They don’t need any more.