Posted on 12/12/2003 10:41:09 AM PST by ibheath
Medicare--I ask for your help...as Majority Leader and as a physician. I know the liberal bias in the media is trying to discredit the momentous achievement by President Bush and Senate Republicans in passing a Medicare bill that will benefit millions and millions of seniors and individuals with disabilities who don't have access to prescription drugs. These drugs are life-saving. It is a challenge to overcome this bias. The only way you are going to get the facts straight up, without the media filter, is straight from the source. As you know, I have been working on this for 6 years. I know the bill. So here goes. Read the 9 points below and share them with friends and your e-mail lists.
Conservative Victories in the Medicare Bill
1. Makes HEALTH SAVINGS ACCOUNTS (HSAs) -- formerly known as Medical Savings Accounts -- more attractive by eliminating restrictions that have prevented broad access to this consumer-driven health coverage option. Currently, MSAs are available only on a demonstration basis to small employers, and several design elements have made them unattractive to broader markets. The Medicare bill eliminates these onerous restrictions, and make HSAs permanent and available to all consumers.
2. Expands PRIVATE health plan CHOICE and COMPETITION in Medicare. The bill dramatically expands private health plan choices so that seniors will have access to the same types of health care options that members of Congress and federal workers enjoy through the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program (FEHBP).
3. Makes flexible MARKET-BASED PRIVATE DRUG COVERAGE available to seniors. Seniors who wish to stay in the traditional Medicare Fee-for-Service program will have the option to get prescription drug coverage through RISK-BEARING, competitively bid private insurance plans. These plans will negotiate price discounts directly with manufacturers and pharmacies and pass them on to seniors.
4. Focus on PREVENTION, DISEASE MANAGEMENT, PATIENT SAFETY, AND QUALITY IMPROVEMENT. Medicare payments to providers and health plans will be linked directly to quality improvements. For example, hospitals will receive full market basket payment updates only if they provide quality data to Medicare. Doctors will be given new incentives to write and submit prescriptions electronically to improve efficiency and cut down on medical errors. The Medicare program will include chronic disease management and expanded preventive care, including a new "Welcome to Medicare" physical.
5. REDUCES THE COST of Prescription Drugs. The bill includes important changes to patent law that will save consumers hundreds of millions of dollars each year by SPEEDING GENERIC DRUGS to market more quickly. It also authorizes government studies comparing the clinical effectiveness of drug therapies.
6. Introduces more rational cost-sharing, including MEANS TESTING the Medicare Part B premium. The bill means tests the Medicare Part B premium for the first time. Beginning in 2007, seniors with incomes of $80,000 and higher will pay a higher proportion of Part B premium costs on a sliding scale basis. The bill also raises Medicare's Part B deductible for the first time in over a decade and adjusts it for inflation. Cost-sharing and coinsurance levels for the new drug coverage generally are linked to prescription drug cost inflation, ensuring that seniors will continue to share responsibility for their drug costs over time.
7. Provides for direct price COMPETITION between traditional Medicare and private health plans. Once private health plans have an opportunity to become a more stable alternative to traditional Medicare, the legislation includes a six-year demonstration of direct price competition between private health plans and traditional Medicare in selected cities throughout the country, beginning in 2010.
8. Requires HONEST ACCOUNTING of Medicare's long-term liabilities. New, more transparent accounting safeguards will help put the program on a stronger financial foundation by alerting future Congresses and Presidents when the program's costs are rising faster than expected so they can take necessary actions to address the problem.
9. TARGETS prescription drug coverage to seniors with lower incomes and high catastrophic drug costs.While the legislation provides all Medicare beneficiaries with the option to enroll in private health plans offering prescription drug coverage, it provides much more generous assistance to those seniors who truly need it: those with lower incomes and high drug costs.
Thanks for helping me educate others on this matter. I hope this has been useful to your understanding as well.
Have a wonderful holiday season.
Bill Frist
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5. REDUCES THE COST of Prescription Drugs.Every time a commodity is subsidized the price of the commodity increases. This situation is no different.
BUT now thanks to Mr. Frist's and Bush's elderly votebuying scheme I have to pay more for other peoples as well.
A more honest letter would have been the following--
Dear conservative,
I realize that this is big government that I am asking you to pay for at a tune of a 400 billion per yer price tag. But as a republican I and the president are frightfully insecure about keeping our jobs so we hatched a vote buying scheme. Once again we realize we have screwed you, the base, but that's what we do, so too bad. If you don't like it vote for Howard Dean.
Truthfully put, Bill Frist
But personalizing the issue does not address the substance of Frist's points: the prevention aspects, the privatization aspects, and the competition aspects of this program all can contribute to a long-term decline in government expenditures for elderly health care costs. Not unlike investment or "priming" the pump...and I'm not talking about "investment" like Bill Clinton talked about it--I'm talking about letting Medicare "whither on the vine" (thanks, Newt) as people choose to leave it because there are better alternatives. Or, if the prescription drug program keeps the elderly from being sick in the first place then think how much less will be spent to "fix" a disease in an elderly person.
Imagine if the President and Frist went forward with a "less dismantle Medicare NOW!" plan and rhetoric. Gimme a break; it'd never pass, and the politics would destroy them. Indeed, this is a much better way of re-introducing free market elements into what Hitlery would've reduced to a totally government-controlled system.
At least that is how I see it.
Few people realize what good stuff this law contains: it needs to be touted!
rd.
The only relevant matter to this discussion is if the government can better distribute the scarce medical commodities like doctors, medicine, and hospital beds better than the free market. Everything we've seen through out the history of mankind tells us no. Not without shortages, increase in pricing, and the gradual decline in quality of care.
I agree that many of the Frist's talking points sound good but they are attached to a pig of a spending bill. But I feel we are being robbed of $400 billion dollars with a few pittances thrown at us to make us feel better.
I agree with you with one exception: the word "only" in your first sentence. We have to remember the maxim "Politics is the art of the possible". Manuevers that appear to be backwards in the beginning can, if managed properly, result in gains in the end. Just my two cents.
rd.
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