Animals mandate

Several newspapers recently published editorials and opinion pieces that addressed the new Medicare prescription drug benefit. Summaries play below.

Editorials

• Boston Herald: “A report in Friday’s New York Times quietly noted that federal spending on Medicare Part D will be 20% lower than expected this year because seniors are choosing lower-premium plans,” a Herald editorial states, also noting that insurance companies are “negotiating deeper-than-expected discounts with drug companies,” meaning future federal costs will be lower than expected. “[I]t seems the market favors the beneficiaries. Imagine that,” the Herald piece concludes (Boston Herald, 2/6).
  




• Los Angeles Times: “California and four other states … will file a lawsuit later this month against the federal government” to fight a provision in the program that requires states to “send a monthly check to Washington for roughly the amount they would have had to pay if they were still splitting the cost of Medicaid,” which state officials argue is “unconstitutional,” according to a Times editorial. The editorial continues that because the cost of program was “getting too high,” Congress needed a way to “make it seem less expensive” by shifting “a few dozen billion dollars to the states” (Los Angeles Times, 2/6).
  




• New Haven Register: “Insurance companies can’t claim ignorance and confusion forever,” the Register editorial says about the problems some dual eligibles have faced in filling prescriptions under the new benefit. “If they can’t abide by the Medicare rules, they should be barred from offering the drug benefit coverage with its handsome profit,” the Register concludes (New Haven Register, 2/3).
  

Opinion Pieces

• Steve Butler, Contra Costa Times: The new drug benefit program has “turned out to be the poster child of bad legislation … [and] is the worst expression of … ‘klepotcracy’ that has seized power in Washington,” Butler, president of Pension Dynamics, writes in a Contra Costa Times opinion piece. Butler says that Medicare’s “inability to negotiate” lower prices with pharmaceutical companies and “the freedom” insurance companies have to eliminate certain drugs from their coverage are just two reasons why the drug benefit should be “chalk[ed] … up to the growing list of bad legislation and revisit[ed] again after we have reformed campaign financing” (Butler, Contra Costa Times, 2/6).
  




• HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt, Knight Ridder/Charlotte Observer: “Anytime you make a big change in a small amount of time … there are bound to be unanticipated problems to fix,” Leavitt writes in a Knight Ridder/Charlotte Observer piece, noting “difficulties with data transmission.” Leavitt adds that it is “not acceptable” for beneficiaries to “leave their pharmacy without the medicines they need” and says the government is working to “fin[d] solutions” to the problems. He adds that the measure of success “should not be that we have had no trouble at the outset of a large new program, but rather that the problems are being solved and the system is improving” (Leavitt, Knight Ridder/Charlotte Observer, 2/6).
  




• Rep. Pete Stark, (D-Calif.), Knight Ridder/Charlotte Observer: The 2003 Medicare law “prohibit[ed] Medicare from negotiating lower prices for prescription drugs” and “created a new product line for insurance companies, structuring their payments so that it’s almost impossible for them to lose money,” Stark writes in an Observer opinion piece. The result is “raw deal for beneficiaries and taxpayers, but a great deal for shareholders and corporate executives,” Stark says, concluding, “Republicans need to acknowledge their mistakes and commit to fixing them (Stark, Knight Ridder/Charlotte Observer, 2/6).

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