Remember that Medicare drug benefit bill? The one that the AARP supported? The one the AARP got in trouble with it’s members for supporting? (here’s what I said at the time, back before it turned out whole thing was going to cost more than planned.)
It turns out that since the bill passed, prescription drug prices have jumped an average of 3.4%, and in some cases 10%. Here’s the coverage so far: Reuters, CNN, Associated Press, Bloomberg, MSNBC, and Wired. I wonder if the venerable Alan Greenspan noticed this rather sizable rise in prices.
Really bad timing that Laura Bush is out there stumping for her husband on “the effectiveness of her husband’s tax cuts, improvements in the economy, education reforms and the Medicare prescription drug benefit for seniors.”
But I digress. The one thing that I think most people can agree on is that “Both the discount card available now and the drug coverage coming in 2006 are unnecessarily complex and too expensive.” The current “drug discount cards” are not in wide use because they are too complicated and finding people who know what is going on is difficult. Some people call the benefit such cards provide “a joke…. because the benefit there is so small.”
I don’t intend to spend much time discussing the impending feeding frenzy of the lottery for 50,000 spots in the drug coverage pilot program.
Back when this thing was passed, the AARP basically said that although it needed improvements, it was better than nothing. I submit that they were wrong; doing nothing would have been an improvement. No wonder Ernst & Young’s analysts think price controls for medications may be on the way.