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Health Care Bill Update: Closing The Medicare ‘Doughnut Hole’ Will Actually Cost Seniors (Washington Post)
Six years after Congress added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare, Democrats in the House and Senate are poised to make a central change that they and most older Americans have wanted all along: getting rid of a quirk that forces millions of elderly patients with especially high expenses for medicine to pay for much of it on their own.
The closing of an unusual gap in Medicare drug coverage — a gap that Republicans had, when they controlled Capitol Hill and the White House, insisted was needed for the government to be able to afford the program — would “forever end this indefensible injustice for American’s seniors,” Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said in announcing that the Senate would join the House in supporting the change.
But details of the change underscore that, for patients and the federal budget alike, the implications of the sprawling health-care bills pushed through by congressional Democrats are more nuanced than lawmakers’ talking points.
The Democrats and President Obama have been clear that the “doughnut hole,” as the gap is known, would disappear gradually over the next 10 years. They have not mentioned that Medicare patients would, according to House figures, face a slightly larger hole in coverage during two of the next three years than they do today.
Proponents say the government can afford to eliminate the gap because the pharmaceutical industry would pay for the phaseout. But less than half of the $80 billion that drugmakers agreed to provide, under a health-care reform agreement over the summer with Senate Democrats and the White House, would be used to help fill the gap, according to Senate Democratic aides. Moreover, there are no budget forecasts far enough into the future to show how much the expanded drug benefit would cost the government once the gap is fully closed.
The not-so-sweet side of closing ‘doughnut hole’ – washingtonpost.com.
