Your Dayton's Account: Prescription Drug Coverage for Seniors

Your Dayton's Account:

Prescription Drug Coverage for Seniors

The Senate is now debating, and will soon pass, a prescription drug program for senior citizens and other Medicare recipients. It is long overdue, and something is usually better than nothing. I just wish that this program was something that deserved more celebration and less criticism. Unfortunately and unfairly, however, it will provide many of Minnesota's elderly with much less financial help than they need to afford their exorbitantly overpriced prescription medicines.

Furthermore, the full benefit program will not even begin until the year 2006. For the next 2 ½ years, a drug discount card will be the only assistance which most seniors will receive. For the elderly who have been made destitute and desperate by essential, yet unaffordable, prescription drugs, that further delay will be heartless and cruel.

Even after the program is fully under way, it will not lift enough of the financial burdens crushing many Minnesotans. As now written, it will charge each senior a $35 per month premium and carry a $275 deductible. Thus, a senior citizen will have to pay $695 each year before receiving a dollar in assistance.

After the deductible, the program will pay half of a person's next $4,225 in unreimbursed prescription drug expenditures. Then, ridiculously, a senior must pay all of the next $1,300 in annual costs. At that point, the elderly citizen has had to pay $4,107 of his or her $5,800 medicine costs. For the remainder of that year, the federal program will pay 90 percent of any additional prescription expenses. At the end of a year, however, the financial burden begins again.

Next week, I will offer several amendments to improve some of the legislation's worst deficiencies. One requires the entire program to be operating by January 1, 2004, two years ahead of the current schedule. Another of my amendments reduces the prescription drug coverage which Members of Congress receive to no more than they enacted for Medicare beneficiaries.

Another amendment would force the federal government to reduce its many thousands of pages of Medicare rules and regulations by two-thirds by October 1, 2004. If my colleagues are supportive, I will later propose the same two-thirds reduction in all federal regulations and reporting requirements.

I have also worked with a group of Senators to design an alternative program, which would provide senior citizens with prescription drug coverage equal to what federal employees, including Members of Congress, can buy. Our plan would also charge a $35 monthly premium, but there would be no deductible. The program would pay for 70 percent of seniors' unreimbursed prescription drug expenditures, up to $5,800 per year. Thereafter, our plan would pay 90 percent of any additional costs.

Our plan would give all seniors their choice of private insurance plans or expanded Medicare coverage. It would create real competition among the plans. The federal government's Medicare administrators would be charged with negotiating major reductions in the prices of the prescription drugs which it covers. For the that reason, the pharmaceutical industry strongly opposes our plan. The industry reportedly has two registered lobbyists for every one Member of Congress, so they have a lot of influence. If the drug companies win, however, everyone else in America loses. Seniors pay more for their drugs. Taxpayers pay more for the program's share of those costs. They pay those higher prices for their prescription drugs, as well.

These competing proposals pit most of the American people against the most powerful. In Washington, big money usually wins. Watch to see whose side your elected representatives are on.