Posted on 08/18/2003 3:42:51 AM PDT by RJCogburn
IRRESPONSIBLY, Congress is treating the lack of prescription-drug insurance among some seniors as if it were as common to old age as gray hair.
In reality, 76 percent of seniors currently have pharmaceutical coverage. Rather than target assistance to the remaining 24 percent of seniors, the GOP Congress is crafting a Medicare reform package that President Bush is desperate to sign. This brand-new entitlement — estimated 10-year cost: $400 billion — looks frighteningly like something hammered together by Lyndon Johnson. All Americans over 65 could participate, even multi-millionaires who already have drug coverage.
To prevent Bush from using this surgical-strength legislation to convert compassionate conservatism into Great Society II, pro-market congressmen should pull the plug on this measure and start anew.
One alternative is what I call Pharm-Assist. Starting next Jan. 1 (rather than 2006, as Congress plans), it would cover low-income seniors who lack drug insurance. Those now covered would rely on their existing plans.
Applicants would need incomes no higher than 200 percent of the poverty line, ($17,256 for singles; $21,748 for couples). Congressional Joint Economic Committee data indicate that some 3,395,000 seniors would qualify. Retired bankers and lawyers would fill their prescriptions without taxpayer help.
Pharm-Assist would give enrollees coupons for free prescriptions at retail outlets which Medicare, in turn, would reimburse. These Drug Stamps would total $2,793 per beneficiary next year — double the $1,356 that the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates average seniors without drug insurance will spend this year, plus 3 percent inflation.
Warning: Seniors could hike this benefit’s costs through overuse. How can they be dissuaded from buying Prozac for, say, muscle pain? Seniors would receive incentives to purchase drugs they need, not whichever they want.
Thus, Pharm-Assist would offer beneficiaries year-end checks for half the value of their unused Drug Stamps. Seniors would get medication they truly require, and those who compare prices and buy sparingly would earn cash to spend at will.
Under the Senate plan, someone with $4,000 in annual drug purchases would get a 50 percent discount after a $275 deductible. That’s $1,862.50 on her next $3,725 in expenditures. Add a $420 insurance premium, and her total cost is $2,557.50.
Under Pharm-Assist, however, her $4,000 in purchases minus $2,793 in Drug Stamps would cost $1,207, just 47.2 percent of what the Senate expects Grandma to pay.
Rea Hederman of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis has examined Census Bureau population growth projections and assumed 3 percent inflation and stable elderly poverty. Consequently, he places Pharm-Assist’s 10-year budget at $118.1 billion, just 29.5 percent of the Senate bill’s cost.
Republicans should enact such a focused remedy. Instead, the House and Senate prescriptions (now in reconciliation) so insistently apportion an aspirin to every senior that they deny comprehensive help to the truly needy. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., also is behind this mess.
Though Kennedy battles them at every turn, the president and top Republicans have given him the keys to the drug-coverage sedan.
Republicans inexplicably campaign against people like Kennedy, then hand them the wheel on major legislation. When Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Don Nickles, R-Okla., tried to attach a modest affluence test to the Senate’s Medicare proposal on June 26, Kennedy threatened to drive the entire vehicle off a pier.
The GOP Senate backed Kennedy and killed the amendment.
How ironic: The same Ted Kennedy who slams Republicans for “a tax cut windfall to the wealthy few” doomed prospects for a generous drug benefit reserved for the elderly poor. Instead, underserved seniors will see skimpier assistance so taxpayers can coddle folks like Kennedy’s fellow Cape Cod yachtsman, Walter Cronkite. Invertebrate Republicans notwithstanding, Ted Kennedy should hang his head in shame.
This essay is worth posting just for that phrase alone.
I'd be interested in seeing a Medicaid/Medicare formulary. Can you find one for me?
Why should the government rob the hard working and distribute the loot to anyone, needy or not? If they're old and wrinkled and haven't saved enough to afford medicine let them do without. Health care isn't a right. It's a commodity.
HELLO!!!! This is Socialized Medicine, and it will FAIL (miserably) just like every other Socialistic program!
He would be better served to go to the beach, place his hands on the shore, and try to stop the incomming tide.
We know exactly how it will happen.
Human nature. [greed]
"HELLO!!!! This is Socialized Medicine, and it will FAIL (miserably) just like every other Socialistic program!"
Failure and removal of a failed program are two entirely different things.
The drivel contained in that "document"[?] is so flawed and filled with ambiguities it would take a year to resolve them.
Animals have "rights" also.
Just ask them.
Of course they do not. A 'right' defines a freedom of action in society.
I guess that essay is not for everyone. Sorry for you.
No one should be forced to pay for some one else's health care (or food or housing or clothing or beer or cigarettes or lotto tickets, etc) What it boils down to is subsidising a life style at someone else's expense when any aspect of a life is paid for by wealth redistribution.
Invertebrate Republicans notwithstanding, Ted Kennedy should hang his head in shame.
We should all copy this article and its link and send it to our congresscritters of either species.
You need a road map to recognize ?????
Uhh....I guess so.
Lemmesee.....I turn right at the next corner, then.....
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.