Navigating the Medicare drug benefit

For months, I've had the December 31st sign-up deadline for the Medicare drug benefit (Part D) hanging over my head. It has deliberately been designed to be complicated; the logical way to do it would have been to make it a Medicare program, but in the Bush era this was considered to be the dreaded "socialized medicine," so it had to be written to the benefit of insurance companies, each of which created its own rules of which drugs to cover, how much to charge for premiums, and numerous other variables. The law also prevented the government from negotiating lower drug costs, which of course was a windfall to the drug companies. Because the process is so complicated, I just couldn't deal with it, and so I just let the time slip by until it became something I couldn't avoid. And if I, a reasonably intelligent, educated, and aware person, finds all this hard to navigate, I would imagine there are many others who find it totally overwhelming.

Fortunately, Nancy, the hospice social worker, referred me to a local non-profit agency that does nothing but Part D counseling. Their representative called me this morning, took my information, did the comparisons, and found the plan that she is sure offers the best combination of premiums and co-pays to meet my needs. My situation is relatively simple, because hospice pays for all my drugs except Celebrex; for people who need coverage for multiple drugs face far more complexity, as different programs cover different drugs (and, of course, no one can predict what drugs they may need in the coming year). Obviously, all this could have been avoided by making it a single payer program, like the original Medicare program, but the Bush administration was far more interested in funneling money to drug and insurance companies than to helping elders with what became an ever-growing expense. The Republican congress that passed the benefit did not provide any funding, which vastly increased the size of the deficit (and making hollow Republican opposition to the current health care reform legislation, which does provide payment mechanisms). In order to hold down costs, which could have been done by negotiating drug prices or placing limits on insurer profits (ideologically unacceptable), Congress created the hated "doughnut hole"; a process by which the individual, after accruing a set amount of benefits, has to pay full price until another threshhold is reached, at which point the benefit kicks in again.

After a few phone calls back and forth I was given a phone number and was able to enroll over the phone. So something that has been nagging at me for months is now taken care of. It just shouldn't be this hard!