CMS misses deadline for Part D assistance website
From SFGate:
Medicare has missed its deadline for setting up an Internet site to help seniors chose among their many — and confusing — options for prescription drug coverage.The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ online prescription drug information service, featuring a computerized system for comparing different plans, was supposed to be introduced today. Instead, the agency hopes to launch the service Monday, although that date is not certain.Medicare officials said they decided on the delay because of the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. Monday is considered a “target” date.”We want to make sure there are no bugs in it and, when we do go live with it, it will be ready to go,” said Jack Cheevers, spokesman for the Medicare office in San Francisco. “It’s an enormously complex task to get all this information entered into this thing.”Medicare is offering drug coverage for the first time in its four-decade history under a program that starts Jan. 1. It is the biggest change ever in the program.
The online comparison service, which will be available at www.medicare.gov, is considered a key aid to seniors and other Medicare beneficiaries who must choose from a complex array of coverage plans that providers began marketing Oct. 1. Enrollees can begin signing up for the benefit on Nov. 15.More than 40 prescription-only drug plans are available in California, as well as plans offered regionally that combine a drug benefit with a health plan.The online information service will prompt beneficiaries to enter the drugs they take and other information. It will then list options, including co-payments and monthly premiums.To assist seniors who are uncomfortable with the Internet, the federal agency will have call-service representatives available at (800) 633-4227 to walk callers through the process of selecting a plan. But because representatives rely on the online tool, that service also will be delayed.This is not the first glitch associated with the rollout of the drug benefit.The agency’s 2006 handbook, which is being sent this month to more than 40 million Medicare beneficiaries, contains an error that tells low-income seniors that they can sign up for any Medicare plan and pay no monthly premium, when there are actually a limited number of free plans for those beneficiaries.
These problems are frustrating some advocates for seniors, such as David Grant, director of health policy for Senior Action Network in San Francisco.”They screwed up the ‘Medicare & You’ handbook,” he said. “Nobody knows when this Web site is going to get going. The list of the drugs being covered by these plans keeps getting put off from one week to the next.”Grant said he believes these kinds of errors could have been avoided if the government had not been in such a rush to stick to its rollout date of Jan. 1, which was set in 2003.