President acknowledges Part D problems

The new prescription drug benefit is helping a large majority of Medicare beneficiaries, President Bush said yesterday, while acknowledging that some patients have experienced problems. ”When you make a big change in a program involving millions of people, there are bound to be some challenges,” Bush said in his weekly radio address. ”And this has been the case with the new drug coverage.”
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The average premium that beneficiaries pay is now expected to be about $25 a month instead of $37, as projected last year. The typical senior citizen will pay about half of what he or she used to spend on prescription drugs, the president said. However, the government estimates that several hundred thousand low-income beneficiaries had trouble making the transition to the new program. They had been getting their drugs through Medicaid, but that coverage ended Dec. 31.

The government was supposed to automatically enroll them in a private plan, but many were not included in the transfer. Others were charged more for medicine than they should have been under the program’s rules. Dozens of states stepped in on an emergency basis to keep their poorest residents from going without medicine.

Read more at Boston.com.

Ed:  By the end of January, only 14.3 million seniors, out of a total of 43 million who were eligible, had enrolled in Part D.  Almost half of those are dual eligibles automatically enrolled in the program by the government.  This falls far short of CMS’s Part D enrollment projections of 29.3 million–a figure that is necessary to sustain to program without large increases in premiums in future years.   Source:  KFF Issue Brief, Medicare Part D enrollment.