Medicare beneficiaries struggling with prescription drug coverage

By Julian Pecquet
The Hill, July 25, 2011

Five years after the launch of Medicare prescription drug coverage, many beneficiaries are still struggling to sign up, according to a new report from the Medicare Rights Center.

The report highlights how hard it is for beneficiaries to choose among “a multitude of plans that have different benefit structures, pharmacy networks, formularies and rules for accessing benefits.”

“This report reinforces what we hear time and again on our helpline,” center President Joe Baker said in a statement. “The Part D plan selection process is enough to make many beneficiaries and their loved ones throw up their arms in surrender. People simply want to be able to find and enroll in the drug plan that is right for them, without getting stuck in a morass of indistinguishable plan options.”

http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/medicare/173345-medicare-beneficiaries-struggle-with-prescription-drug-coverage

“People simply want to be able to find and enroll in the drug plan that is right for them, without getting stuck in a morass of indistinguishable plan options.” No. People simply want to have the drugs that they need when they need them.

The Part D drug plan should have been created as a straightforward benefit of Medicare. The program should have been funded equitably through the tax system, and the benefit should have been simply to be able to obtain necessary drugs whenever prescribed. But no.

Congress decided to interject a separate, expensive, administratively complex industry into the picture – a market of competing drug plans. Not only do these entities waste resources, they establish even more barriers to access to the drugs patients need – barriers such as formulary exclusions, tiering of drugs, prior authorization requirements, exclusion of pharmacies from the plan networks, not to mention the complexities of trying to select from a hodgepodge of plans with widely different characteristics.

The obvious solution would be to establish a single payer national health program in which pharmaceuticals are a full, unencumbered benefit. That’s as obvious as, say, when you need the debt limit raised, you simply vote to raise the debt limit. But Congress doesn’t seem to be capable of making obvious choices.