I hope you'll read this diary, and recommend, if you're so inclined. Even more important, within the next 48 hours, do whatever you can to protect and educate the seniors whom you love, from the insurance predators who have declared America's elderly as ripe, easy, and profitable targets.
Medicare Part D, has what is know in the parlance of the insurance industry as "open enrollment". Let's also call it what it really is, it's open season to go hunting for seniors. A massive giveaway and profit center has been created by the Medicare Prescription Drug legislation, and an artfully conceived and perfectly legal assault against our senior citizens is well underway.
I'm talking now about the Part D, Medicare Prescription Drug Plan. A misnomer if there ever was one. It's a scam, by, for and about the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry. It's being rolled out at this very second.
I'd also like to bring to your attention an organization based in New York called The Center for Medical Consumers.
The Center for Medical Consumers is one of the most eminent citizen advocacy groups in the country, and I urge you to visit their web site when you have time (link provided).
http://www.medicalconsumers.org/
The Center for Medical Consumers and many, many other citizen advocacy groups have issued dire warnings to seniors about the myriad failures and subterfuge attached to this "benefit". On a personal level, I will tell anyone who is unfamiliar with it--it is unintelligible. It is designed to confuse. I am on the verge of telling my own mother to opt out because I don't want to jeopardize in any way, her Medicare Part A and B coverage or her Medigap coverage.
Sit back for a moment, stop and think about these newest victims--America's elderly. Then ask yourself--have they no shame? Do these politicians have no sense of decency targeting their own mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers? Most Democrats fought this legislation, and we must insist that a centerpiece of the 06 agenda will be a meaningful, simple, understandable and straightforward prescription drug benefit.
If I'm not mistaken, the Part D (prescription drug coverage) strikes many experts (and I am not one of them), as the first step in privatizing Medicare. I can assure you from the blizzard of promotional material I have seen, every insurance company in America wants to get on the Medicare Part D gravy train. Many senior citizens (my mother included) are enrolled in the tried and true, traditional government Medicare Plan. The Prescription Drug benefit looks to many like a trojan horse--a way to get millions of seniors to enroll in private plans and give up the relative safety of the original government plan.
The Center for Medical Consumers has issued one of the most scathing warnings I've seen. I'm posting excerpts from their statement. I'll also provide a link to the entire statement.
From the Center for Medical Consumers:
Marketing Blitz Takes Aim at Medicare Enrollees
"The Associated Press reports that the large insurers approved by Medicare to offer prescription drug insurance (Aetna and United Health among others) are each planning to spend between $30 and $80 million on marketing campaigns. At stake is an estimated $10 billion dollars in additional revenues which Wall Street has characterized as "an earnings bonanza." I would call it "insurance industry pork."
Medicare recipients will continue to be on the receiving end of this marketing blitz throughout the Part D enrollment period, which begins November 15, 2005 and ends in May 2006. Seniors should also be prepared for some insurers to promote their Medicare Advantage plans as a better choice than signing up only for stand-alone drug coverage.
These plans are a "managed choice" alternative to traditional Medicare and include hospital and physician coverage as well as drugs, but they limit the choice of doctors and other providers. The "bait" for switching to Advantage is that, at least during the initial enrollment period, the plans will pick up some or all of the Part D out of pocket cost of premiums and deductibles. These could easily add up to thousands of dollars for seniors who chose to remain in traditional Medicare.
The government has offered billions of dollars in subsidies to encourage insurers to offer Advantage plans. These subsidies make selling Advantage plans a much more profitable business for insurers than selling only the stand-alone drug coverage - at least over the short term. But when the subsidies end after a few years, the plans are likely to become unprofitable as the growing ranks of aging and sicker seniors run up larger medical bills. Insurers, having reaped billions in Medicare subsidies, are then free to bail out of the market, as they have in the recent past.
The new plans are the "first strike" in the administration's efforts to privatize Medicare. And Medicare spent millions on a slick, but inaccurate, advertising campaign to sell the new plans to the public, according to the U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO). This suggests that the administration knowingly put politics ahead of the welfare of those on Medicare."
Arthur A. Levin, MPH, Center for Medical Consumers © October 2005
Here's a link to the complete statement:
http://www.medicalconsumers.org/...