Medicare Drug Plan a Fiasco for Seniors

Last year, President George W. Bush couldn't stop talking about the Medicare prescription drug plan, boasting that his administration and Republicans in Congress had made it easier and less expensive for seniors to get the medicines they need.

In his State of the Union speech Jan. 31, he didn't mention it once.

What happened in the months in between is that seniors began the confusing and cumbersome process of signing up for one of the hundreds of plans. If they made it through that hoop, they tried to use them to fill prescriptions.

Millions of seniors have discovered their drugs aren't covered, or cost more than they did under previous insurance plans. Pharmacists report spending hours each day on the phones trying to get paperwork straightened out.

The debacle is scary even to seniors who aren't affected — yet. Many CWA retirees are among those who haven't signed up because they have better coverage through their former employers. But the very existence of the flawed plan is giving companies an incentive to drop their retiree drug coverage. While CWA leaders pledge to fight any such assault on benefits, non-union retirees may be out of luck.

For CWA retirees who have signed up, or tried to, it's been an ordeal:

• "Were the materials understandable? Not unless you are some kind of genius," Marck Mulligan of Lutherville, Md., said.
• "What a mess," said Pearl Weiner, a retired New York City schoolteacher whose husband is a CWA retiree. "There is no way to get out of this trap. We are paying more for every prescription we fill."
• "It is not the panacea we have been led to believe," Local 13550 retiree Teresa Foley said. "The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing."

"This was never a plan that was going to benefit seniors," CWA Secretary-Treasurer Barbara Easterling said. "It's just another way to enrich an outrageously profitable drug industry that spends millions of dollars a year lobbying Congress to make sure it stays that way."

Critics say one of the most contemptible parts of the drug scheme is that the legislation creating it bars the government from negotiating a bulk price for commonly used medications — something the Veterans Health Administration has done for years to keep costs down. Democrats tried to get bipartisan support for a Medicare drug bill that would keep costs down through bulk pricing but Republican leaders wouldn't stand for it.

The drug industry employs more than two lobbyists for every member of Congress to ensure that such measures stay out of today's legislation. Yet the tens of millions the industry spends annually on lobbying isn't even a drop in the bucket of drug industry revenues: Pfizer alone had $11.3 billion in profit in 2004.

The nature of the relationship among Congress, the federal bureaucracy and the drug industry is so insidious that critics say the public doesn't stand a chance without real and significant reform. A glaring example lies with former Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.), who pushed the Medicare bill through Congress, then left to become president of a powerful drug industry lobbying group.

At this point, even Republicans who voted for the bill are expressing anger about the program. To date, however, none of them has signed onto a bill introduced Jan. 20 by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) to begin to fix the problems. Called the Repair Act (S. 2183), it has 29 Democratic co-sponsors.

"The program has been rife with problems, causing many of our senior citizens to go without their life-saving prescription drugs," Rockefeller said.