Fighting for Affordable Prescription Drugs

• On September 9, 2004, John D. Dingell denounced a Bush Administration plan to increase Medicare premiums by 17 percent for 41.8 million seniors and disabled Americans. The announcement of the biggest increase in premiums in Medicare history came six weeks ahead of schedule and before a holiday weekend instead of two weeks before the November 2 Presidential election when it was previously scheduled to be released.
  
  
• “It is not surprising that the President is raising the premiums 17 percent or that it’s being done in a circumspect fashion so it won’t hurt his re-election campaign,” said Dingell. “After all, this law was written by Republicans and their friends in the pharmaceutical and insurance companies in the dark of night. If that’s not bad enough, the full effect of the law and its negative impact on seniors and the disabled, will not hit us until 2006, long after the election.”
  
  
• Dingell also condemned the Bush Administration for withholding information about the true cost of the new Medicare law. “This Administration lied to Congress and the American people about the cost of the Medicare law in order to get the bill passed. Even then, they still had to resort to breaking bones within their own Party to win votes. A bill that could stand on its merits would not have required the shady business and dirty politics the Bush Administration had to use to get the bill passed. The Administration should be ashamed of these tactics, and more ashamed of the fact that seniors and the disabled will suffer as a result of this bad Medicare law.”
  
  
• The Medicare Prescription Drug Modernization and Improvement Act of 2003, which takes full effect in 2006, will largely still leave millions of Medicare retirees with little to no prescription drug coverage. The law penalizes employers who provide their employees with a prescription drug plan, which will result in the loss of employer benefits for millions of retirees. The law also privatizes the Medicare program by requiring seniors to go outside of traditional Medicare and seek coverage from private HMO’s and other insurance companies with no guarantee for coverage and no guarantee for a fixed and affordable premium.
  
  
• Further, the law contains a “doughnut-hole,” a $2,850 gap where there is no coverage between $2,251 and $5,100 in spending. This will financially cripple many seniors who will have to assume the entire out-of-pocket expenses for their pharmaceutical drug costs, including paying a monthly premium, even when they are receiving no benefits. The total in out-of-pocket expenses for a Medicare beneficiary before they are eligible for catastrophic coverage is $3,600, or $5,100 in drug costs.