Bush-Made Disaster

Well we didn't have to wait long for the first national disaster to strike in 2006. Although it's not a natural disaster, but a Bush-made disaster, much like the war in Iraq, the harm done to America and it's citizens could prove fatal, and is already costing states quite a bit.

The new and improved Medicare drug coverage that began on January 1st, seems to have been poorly implemented and now some one million poor and elderly citizens are without medication that they desperately need to function.

In designing the program, the Bush administration did not want the Medicare drug benefit to be administered directly by the federal government. Instead, it devised a public program run by hundreds of competing private drug plans, each with its own prices and coverage policies.

In many cases, pharmacists and patient-advocates say, elderly people are being denied benefits because of inaccurate or outdated information in computer databases used by the government and the individual health plans to interact with pharmacies.

In some cases, there is no information on a beneficiary, or the computer says the beneficiary is ineligible for coverage. In other cases, cost-sharing information is wrong, and pharmacists are being told to charge beneficiaries hundreds of dollars when in fact they have co-payments of only $1 to $5.

I never really followed the debate on the bill last year, but I remember critics calling it confusing and expensive. Most elderly people I know are already confused enough, and forcing them to jump through hoops to get medicine will most likely make them more confused and cranky. And sick. In many cases, state governments have stepped in and passed emergency bills to help during this crisis, but I think that it's only 13 states so far, and I'm not sure what the poorer states plan on doing, it's quite possible we will have another Katrina on our hands, only this time they will not be visible from rooftops, they may just pass on quietly to be found at some later date.

And states who have done the right thing and pitched in to help the elderly will not be reimbursed by Medicare. Instead, they will have to try to get money out of the insurance companies. Good luck to them.

We should have figured that the Bush folks would administer this massive initiative with the familiar level of incompetence we have witnessed in nearly all of the undertakings of the administration in the last 5 years. War gone horribly wrong, corruption at the highest levels, and emergency planning that only came through when the emergency was over. Thank goddess the Republicans never got their hands on our Social Security money, I can't even imagine what January 1st might look like this year.

Heck of a job Georgy.

| +Save/Share | |