Did Bushists not foresee that Srs would actually try to use Rx program?

[BurtWorm]

:rofl:

From "Bush the Incompetent," by Harold Meyerson


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/24/AR2006012401163_pf.html


...


It's the president's prescription drug plan (Medicare Part D), though, that is his most mind-boggling failure. As was not the case in Iraq or with Katrina, it hasn't had to overcome the opposition of man or nature. Pharmacists are not resisting the program; seniors are not planting car bombs to impede it (not yet, anyway). But in what must be an unforeseen development, people are trying to get their medications covered under the program. Apparently, this is a contingency for which the administration was not prepared, as it has been singularly unable to get its own program up and running.

Initially, Part D's biggest glitch seemed to be the difficulty that seniors encountered in selecting a plan. But since Part D took effect on Jan. 1, the most acute problem has been the plan's failure to cover the 6.2 million low-income seniors whose medications had been covered by Medicaid. On New Year's Day, the new law shifted these people's coverage to private insurers. And all hell broke loose.

Pharmacists found that the insurers didn't have the seniors' names in their systems, or charged them far in excess of what the new law stipulated -- and what the seniors could afford. In California fully 20 percent of the state's 1.1 million elderly Medicaid recipients had their coverage denied. The state had to step in to pick up the tab for their medications. California has appropriated $150 million for the medications, and estimates that it will be out of pocket more than $900 million by 2008-09. Before Jan. 1 the Bush administration had told California that it would save roughly $120 million a year once Part D was in effect.

California's experience is hardly unique. To date at least 25 states and the District have had to defray the costs to seniors that Part D was supposed to cover. What's truly stunning about this tale is that, while officials may not have known how many non-indigent seniors would sign up of their own accord, they always knew that these 6.2 million seniors would be shifted into the plan on the first day of the year. There were absolutely no surprises, and yet administration officials weren't even remotely prepared....

[SPKrazy]

1. Of Course They Did

They want it to fail so that they can say it is just never going to work and then it will be off the table, then Medicare itself will be frought with problems and it will be off the table as it is now. Instead it will only be HMO's that Medicare will have and it will make the insurance companies rich, they will cover prescriptions, and that will be the goal of a failed RX drug plan for Medicare.

Short version: The goal is to make it fail so that only Medicare HMO's will be an option for RX drug coverage, then they will be the only Medicare available.

[Warpy]

2. This program was designed by and for Big Pill and Big Insurance

and the seniors were considered largely irrelevant to the process (they'll do what we tell them they can do). This was engineered for maximum corporate profit and corporate convenience in amassing it. That seniors were left with an unworkable maze of plans and reams of conflicting information while being lost in a system so Byzantine that even social security workers (no strangers to paperwork) can't figure it out and have lost a lot of people out of the system completely wasn't considered. Nor was the effect that the "doughnut" of enormously increased prescription costs for those with conditions requiring a lot of expensive meds (like transplant and HIV patients) would place an unbearable burden on some people wasn't considered. Industry got its profit first and foremost a couple of years ago. Seniors will just have to take what crumbs they can figure out how to get.

It's just more GOP diddling with a system that should have been nationalized and made into universal health coverage decades ago. If there's a way to make it unworkable and maximize the cruelty, they'll find it.