It was due to their failed conservative ideology and the money and influence of big pharmaceutical and insurance corporations according to this report:
Why is the Costly, Confusing Part D Prescription Drug Program Dropping Millions of Seniors into the Donut Hole?
Answer: Failed Conservative Ideology and the Money and Influence of Big PhRMA.
By Roger Hickey, Jeff Cruz, and Britt Cass
September 2006Millions of seniors are falling into the coverage gap known as the donut hole, in which they get no coverage at all, even while still paying monthly premiums. At the same time, the pharmaceutical industry is launching a ten million dollar ad campaign to tout the Bush Part D prescription drug program and the vulnerable members of Congress who support it. This dichotomy of special interests touting government programs that benefit their bottom line while the American people suffer the consequences is commonplace under the current Congress and Administration. This report details how under the reign of conservatism, pharmaceutical companies are making record profits from Part D and Republicans are receiving valuable campaign contributions, while millions of American seniors are stuck with nearly a $3,000 donut hole gap in coverage in a prescription drug program that is needlessly costly and confusing.
This failure to deliver a simple, affordable, and guaranteed prescription drug program to American seniors is the direct result of blind adherence to a conservative ideology that hates government. Subscribers to this ideology always favor private industry over public services, even when the public sector can deliver services more efficiently. The conservative desire for less government breeds cronyism and corruption. Having industry lobbyists write legislation such as the Part D prescription drug program is not an isolated incident; it is an organized and systematic part of their K-street project. Selling out to the highest bidder is the Republican way of doing business.
Since 1994, when they gained the majority in the House of Representatives, Republicans in Congress have been using their majority status to ensure that the only people with access to power on Capitol Hill are those who can afford to buy it. Nowhere was this rule more evident than in the creation and execution of Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit that was passed as part of the Medicare Modernization and Reauthorization Act of 2003. This is because the law was not written by members Congress, the elected voice of the American people, for the benefit of America’s senior and disabled citizens who depend on Medicare as their safety net. Instead, Republicans used their power as the majority party to allow the drug and insurance companies, who had donated millions in campaign contributions, to write Part D. Not surprisingly, these interest groups formulated the bill in such a way as to benefit the industries they were paid to represent, not the American public.
The Cost of InefficiencyThe program developed out of these back-room dealings is both confusing and inefficient. Under the current policy, Medicare is actually prohibited from using its bulk purchasing power to negotiate
lower drug prices, a process which the Veterans Administration has used successfully for years.
Part D adds $70 billion in annual costs due to this prohibition on price negotiation. The program
also costs an estimated additional $5 billion per year due to the administrative complexity involved
with running Part D through hundreds of private insurance companies as opposed to Medicare.
Because of these huge excess costs to taxpayers, the coverage provided by the program is woefully
inadequate, a fact best exemplified by the "donut hole."
The Donut HoleThe donut hole is a provision which requires enrollees to be responsible for 100% of their own
drug costs between $2,250 and $5,100 each year even while still paying monthly premiums.
This donut hole gap doesn’t have to exist. If Medicare was permitted to use its bulk purchasing
power to negotiate lower prices and there was a simple guaranteed benefit offered directly from
Medicare the savings could easily be used to eliminate the donut hole. However, because this
means less profit for pharmaceutical and insurance compaines, these industries will spend millions
fighting fixes to Part D that would help American seniors and disabled.
Adobe reader (PDF) required
http://home.ourfuture.org/part-d-failure-of.pdfAnd here's a refresher on the tactics Congressional Republicans used to pass Medicare part D legislation:
Part D - How Did This Happen?
Created June 6, 2006As the problems with Medicare Part D continue to unfold, more and more people are wondering how our Congress could have voted for this flawed legislation. Louise Slaughter, a Democratic member of the House of Representatives, from New York, gave her view of how this happened in the June 1 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Slaughter says, "The political process used to pass Part D was the worst abuse of the legislative process I have seen during my 20 years in Congress." Not too surprisingly, she puts the blame on a few powerful Republican leaders. When the bill was being drafted in 2003, both Democratic and Republican Representatives wrote 59 amendments and all but one of which where rejected by the House Committee on Rules (of which Slaughter is a ranking member), preventing debate in Congress. One of these amendments would have allowed Medicare to negotiate lower drug costs and another would have allowed enrollees to import drugs from Canada.
According to Slaughter when it came time to combine the House and Senate versions of the bill, senior Republicans not only kept much of the process secret but also excluded Democrats on the conference committee. Lobbyists from pharmaceutical companies were invited in and they, as well as health insurance lobbyists, influenced the final version of this legislation.
Members of the House were given less one day to read the 850 page bill before it was brought up for a vote at 3:00 a.m. This process was a violation of House rules. All the Democratic Representatives and 22 Republicans voted against the legislation on the first vote. Votes are usually give 15 minutes to pass or fail but this one was held open for a record three hours. During this time tactics were used that also violated House rules. The House Ethics Committee later admonished Tom Delay (R-Tex.) and Candice Miller (R-Mich.) for attempting to bribe Nick Smith (R-Mich.) to obtain his vote. When there was a narrow margin in favor of the bill at 5:35 a.m., the vote was brought to a close and the legislation passed.
Slaughter quotes Representative Bill Thomas (R-Cal.) as saying that the goal of the bill was to "end Medicare as we know it." She goes on to add that the bill will give the drug industry an increase of $139 billion in profit over the next eight years. Some of this money comes out of the pockets of states, which are required to partially fund Part D. This means that American tax dollars are subsidizing insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies.
http://www.needymeds.com/articles/howdidithappen.tmlAnd you might remember that the Administration initially told Congress that Medicare Part D would cost $395 billion, but announced just a month after passage of the legislation that the price tag would actually be $534 billion. The legislation would never have been passed if Congress had known the true cost. How could the White House have been so confused about the cost? They weren't. They knew and they lied.
Richard Foster, the chief actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the top independent Medicare cost analyst, revealed he had been threatened by the Bush administration that he would be fired if he told Congress the true cost of the policy. He received orders in June 2003 from his boss, Thomas Scully, the Bush-appointed director of the Medicare program, instructing him to ignore information requests from members of Congress who were drafting the drug bill. In the past, lawmakers had free access to the actuary's estimates. And they assumed they were getting a true statistic as they considered the bill this time.
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2004/04/05/medicare/index.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
