Medicare Drug Plan Is Miserable Failure

Once again, we see a private program touted by the Republicans turn out to be a disaster. This time it's the privitized Medicare drug program. Audits of the program show it is having many problems.

Democrats tried to keep the program simple. They wanted the government to provide the drug program through Medicare, after negotiating lower drug prices with the drug companies. But that made far too much sense for Republicans, and probably would have worked and saved money for everyone.

Republicans said they had a better plan. They not only outlawed the negotiating of lower drug prices, they forced our elderly to purchase their drug coverage from private insurance programs. That way, their buddies in the drug and insurance companies could be assured of making windfall profits.

Of course, the program has turned out to be a disaster, and those who suffer because of it are our elderly citizens. Way to go Republicans! You have not only denied health insurance to children, now you have thrown our elderly citizens under the proverbial bus.

Audits of the private drug program have shown a myriad of problems, including:

A. Improper termination of patients with HIV/AIDS. One company terminated thousands saying they had not paid their premiums. The problem is that most of them had paid their premiums and had the cancelled checks to prove it. This company just decided these people were cutting into those windfall profits and dumped them.

B. Delaying access to urgently needed medications. Medicare had to completely cut off a Florida insurance company for posing "an imminent and serious threat" to its thousands of members.

C. Having huge backlogs of claims and complaints. One company has a backlog of over 354,000 claims, and they are not alone.

D. Refusing to answer the phone when patients, doctors and drugstores call. It can take around 30 minutes to get a call answered (if you can get it answered at all).

E. Marketers and agents were not properly supervised. Many of the elderly were sold expensive programs which did not cover their needs.

F. Proper claims have been denied without explanation.

After seeing what a mess the insurance programs have made out of what should be a simple drug program, do you still want insurance companies to be in charge of our healthcare? Isn't it time to get the profit motive out of health insurance, and institute a government single-payer system? The insurance companies have already shown they cannot be trusted with our healthcare.

Remember this when you go to vote next year. The only thing Republicans are willing to protect is corporate profits. They must be voted out of office.