Letters to the Editor
Des Moines Register
November 7, 2005
As the cries of outrage over the new Medicare drug plan grow louder, the shadow cast over the AARP grows darker.
It was AARP’s endorsement in 2003 that propelled the plan through Congress. The organization told members that the need to expand Medicare to cover prescription drugs was sufficiently urgent to outweigh the law’s faults. What few understood at the time was that the law went far beyond drugs and provided for the dismantling of Medicare in favor of taxpayer-supported, private-profit health plans. And AARP’s “nonprofit” arm stood to make big bucks off the plan.
AARP has collected hundreds of millions for use of its logo by private firms, including, under the new law, United Health Care. It makes millions more skimming profits from premiums it collects for private insurers. Its defenders contend that AARP’s nonprofit and for-profit segments are totally independent. Yeah, right. But it’s impossible to dispute that the nonprofit activities that supposedly champion retirees’ causes are what makes its endorsements profitable.
Former Gov. Terry Branstad, in an Oct. 22 Register essay that sounded as if it were composed by the pharmaceutical lobby, defended the Medicare drug plan as providing relief to the elderly who now pay huge drug bills. Some of the elderly may enjoy some benefits, but far from enough to justify the cost to taxpayers imposed by the drug makers.
One of the law’s most outrageous provisions prohibits Medicare from negotiating drug prices – meaning the pharmaceutical industry will set the price, subject to change without notice.
And, in what appears to be an effort to panic Medicare users into buying into this nonsense, the law imposes a penalty of 1 percent per month on the premiums of those who don’t sign on promptly.
Why are drugs cheaper in Canada? Because Canada negotiates the price. So does Veterans Affairs. So does Medicaid. And the pharmaceutical industry would like to force them and all other buyers into line.
The answer? Congress should shift into reverse and kill the 2003 Medicare revisions now, before the roots of this noxious weed get firmly established.
-Bill Leonard, Des Moines