Bfgrn
Gold Member
- Apr 4, 2009
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How Medicare Part D Raised US Healthcare Costs
Q. The prescription drug benefit was described as a poison pill at the time. Does it require funding?
A. More than just a poison pill, it’s a giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry to increase the cost of medicine.
During the Reagan-Bush 1980s and the first years of the 1990s, in fact, Medicare was predicted to go bankrupt within fifteen years. Medicare Part D was said to have been intended to be a poison pill for the purpose of killing off Medicare. Medicare Part D was designed to deprive the government of the right to negotiate wholesale drug prices, which would deplete Medicare of over $600 billion in the next decade and hand it over to about a dozen big drug companies.
How Part D Enables Private Sector Profiteering
Under the 2003 law, prices and “formularies”—the lists of which drugs are covered according to different “tiers” of coverage—are set by the individual companies that offer Part D plans. Each company makes its own deals with drug manufacturers for discounts in the form of rebates to the companies, not the consumers. There’s little real competition among the insurers, and to the extent they are able to squeeze discounts out of the manufacturers, they go straight to their own bottom lines and not to consumers.
One of the Medicare Modernization Act’s biggest handouts to the drug industry was its reclassification of 6.2 million low-income elderly and disabled people who had been receiving drug coverage through the Medicaid program. The new law forced these people into Part D, and now the government subsidizes the same drugs at higher prices. According to the 2007 House report, that change alone stood to increase drug company profits by an estimated $2.8 billion in 2007.
In an investigation last October, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform found that in 2007:
- Discounts negotiated by private plans under part D reduced overall drug spending by only 8%.
- The Medicaid program, where the government buys drugs directly, cuts costs a full 26% via rebates.
And Denis Kucinich refused to vote for Obamacare calling it a sell out to insurance companies that would not solve any of the major problems with health care.
Instead, he favored a single payer system and voted against Obamacare until they needed his vote, then he inexplicably voted for it.
Denis never recanted, yet he voted for it anyway.
Welcome to Washington politics. They are a sick bunch, are they not?
The Democratic Party has moved to the right over the last 30 years. The liberals who supported single payer or at least a public option were shut out on health care reform. That should be a warning for all citizens. But there is NO ONE in today's GOP who is not owned by corporations...NONE.