Medicare D: Who’s Fault?
If you haven’t been following the news, the Medicare Part D drug benefit is turning out to be a disaster–millions of seniors aren’t getting their prescription drugs, for any number of reasons: they’re not listed in the computer, the computer is giving pharmacies wrong information about costs, or the computer systems just aren’t working at all. Pharmacies are on hold for 2-3 hours for one single patient, and states are declaring public health emergencies and paying for the drugs themselves. Recently, the President told insurers the system isn’t working, and that, at least temporarily, there needs to be price controls.
This is a brilliant system for Pharma. They practically wrote the bill, saying how great it would work, and now private insurers and the federal government, who have to implement it, take the blame for a crappy system. Bravo Pharma, bravo! Jolly good play there.
I agree the system is slanted toward big pharma and the insurance industry, but I haven’t seen any problems as a result here in California.
I enrolled my 85 year old aunt in the program sometime before the end of the year. She got a letter before the end of the year, informing her of her enrollment, and shortly after the first of the year, she received her prescription drug card.
There was a little confusion initially at the pharmacy, because we were initially told that she was enrolled already, but soon discovered that she wasn’t. (I attribute that to some unrelated factors though.) A short trip to the pharmacy quickly cleared the situation up, and my aunt is now getting her drugs as prescribed and at the correct cost.
Could some of the confusion be due to when some people enrolled in the program, or the sophistication of the pharmacies handling the prescription? I haven’t seen anything categorizing any of the mitigating factors that could result in such problems.
It’s my understanding that the vast majority of people currently enrolled are those on Medicaid who were automatically (!) enrolled and never had the system explained or indeed much input of any kind.
Along with many others, I have delayed enrollment until the bugs are out. the yearly saving to me would be somewhere in the vicinity of $50 over what I currently pay without any drug insurance.
That’s right, Tychecat. 1 million have signed up on their own; 20 other million were signed up automatically. Medicare is touting this as “21 million people have enrolled in the program!”
Yeah I see now. It’s mainly the medicaid patients that were signed up automatically that are having all the problems.
My husband hasn’t enrolled yet, his costs will go up by about $20.00 per month…and Medicare penalizes you (via an upcharge in the monthly ‘insurance’ cost) for not signing up by THEIR deadline…True government in action. mary