Medicare Part D on the chopping block!
Via Reuters Health:
Just days beforeMedicare officials in Washington unveil the private prescription drugplans that will be available to the program’s 43 million elderly anddisabled beneficiaries starting next January, both liberals andconservatives in Congress are calling for a delay in the controversialprogram.
Conservatives in the U.S. HouseWednesday unveiled “Operation Offset,” an effort to find budget cuts tohelp pay for relief needed to rebuild the states and cities decimatedby Hurricane Katrina three weeks ago. Delaying the new Medicare benefitby a year is at the top of the list, primarily because it would save anestimated $30 billion over the next decade.
“Many of us thought even beforeKatrina we couldn’t afford this benefit,” said Rep. Jeff Flake,Republican from Arizona. “We certainly today have to think we shouldput this benefit off.”
Meanwhile, Democrats in the House andSenate have proposed to delay the benefit’s rollout, at least in thestates directly hit by the hurricane and the surrounding states thatare temporarily hosting most of the evacuees.
Of particular concern, say advocatesfor the poor, are the Medicare beneficiaries whose drug costs arecurrently covered by the Medicaid health program. Those patients –many of them very old or institutionalized, will be automaticallyassigned to a drug plan this fall.
But Ruth Kennedy, deputy Medicaiddirector in Louisiana, says she’s not sure all of her state’s 100,000″dual eligibles” can even be located at this point. As a result, manymight not know how to obtain drugs when their Medicaid drug coverageends Dec. 31.
The Bush administration andRepublican leaders in Congress — who consider the drug benefit theirsignature legislative achievement of the past four years — arestruggling to keep the program on track. House Majority Leader TomDeLay, Republican from Texas, who encouraged the conservative group todevelop ways to pay for hurricane relief, nevertheless called theproposal for delay “a nonstarter.”