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The May 15th deadline for seniors to enroll in Medicare’s prescription drug program is rapidly approaching. Under the law enacting the program, eligible individuals must sign up by then. If they don’t, they will have to pay 1% more for their coverage for each month that they wait to sign up. And this penalty will be in effect for the rest of the beneficiaries’ life.
I think this penalty is terribly unfair. And I am concerned that there is still a lot of confusion about the program. As a nurse, I am particularly worried about the potentially life threatening effects of this dilemma and have been working to help seniors deal with the program’s problems.
As many people may know, I voted against the law that put this program in place. I was deeply concerned that it was too confusing, wouldn’t benefit seniors enough with their prescription costs, and represented a giveaway to the drug and insurance companies because it forbids Medicare from negotiating for lower drug prices. Given the events of the last five or six months, my predictions were all too accurate.
People are still having problems enrolling in the program, which isn’t very surprising given the maze of rules and regulations involved. According to a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, an independent health care research group, nearly half of all Medicare beneficiaries don’t even know that May 15th is the cutoff to enroll in a drug plan without penalty.
From across the Central and South Coasts, I have heard from seniors, the disabled, and their families about their struggle to enroll in an appropriate drug program. Beneficiaries and their loved ones often find it is no easy task to determine the plan best to meet their unique medical needs.
In search of information about the various plans available, many have turned to drug plan sponsored call centers. Federal standards for these call centers require that 80 percent of calls be answered within 30 seconds, yet test calls to several large insurers have found that many fail to met these requirements (New York Times; 4/24/06).
A recently released Government Accounting Office report revealed that written materials provided by Medicare are unclear and one-third of all calls to its helpline resulted in no answer or an answer that was inaccurate or incomplete. The Medicare website does not even comply with basic Federal requirements for accessibility to disabled users, which is especially disturbing given that a high number of Medicare beneficiaries are disabled.
All the while the clock is ticking down to the May 15th deadline.
Given the multitude of problems associated with the implementation of the program I have cosponsored legislation to extend the deadline to December 31, 2006 but the Republican leadership of the House refuses to even bring it up for a hearing.
Fortunately, in the last few weeks, complaints which I and other Members of Congress have raised have been successful in forcing the Bush Administration to make two critical changes to the Medicare Part D program. On April 19th, Medicare officials announced that the agency will allow some low-income Medicare beneficiaries additional time to enroll in the prescription drug benefit without financial penalty.
Last week, Medicare officials announced that they would change Part D policy to ensure that, even when insurance providers change their formularies, already-enrolled beneficiaries would be guaranteed coverage of any medications that were originally covered in their plan through the end of the year.
These much needed changes are good first steps but we need to extend the enrollment deadline for ALL eligible beneficiaries. Seniors and other Medicare beneficiaries need additional time to enroll without incurring devastating life-long penalties. We also need the time to make other essential changes to the program, such as allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices. Our goal must be that this program truly does provide seniors and the disabled with affordable prescription drugs.
Pictured above: (center) Congresswoman Capps meets with Central Coast firefighters to discuss emergency preparedness.
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