HHS Announces Disappointing Medicare Part-D Enrollment Numbers
HHS ANNOUNCES DISAPPOINTING MEDICARE PART-D ENROLLMENT NUMBERS
February 22, 2006
The success of the drug benefit depends on how many people enroll. So far, that's not many.
(Kansas City, MO)In the short term, the success of the Medicare Prescription Drug Plan depends critically on enrollment. Yet voluntary enrollment in the benefit has been disappointing to say the least. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced today that only 25 million of the 42 million eligible Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled.
However, included in that 25 million are about 10 million federal retirees and Medicare-age retirees who receive prescription drug coverage through their former employers, and another 10 million people who were auto-enrolled. Only 5.3 million people have voluntarily enrolled in the program.
"As it stands, the complicated design and poor implementation of the benefit program has doomed the rollout to fail," Cleaver said. "At the Town Hall I hosted this week to talk about the issue, what I heard was frustration. People were sold this plan as a benefit and all it has given them is grief."
HHS has been plagued with set backs in implementing the new drug plan, including the failure of the two-stage sign-up process for dual eligibles, followed by the announcement of participating drug plans without supporting information. During the auto-enrollment process, HHS failed to auto-enroll 14,000 dual-eligible Missourians who were eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare.
One other enrollment number stands out: the relatively low number of low-income Medicare beneficiaries who have successfully applied for subsidies. In this complicated process just 1.1 million of the 4.6 million eligible to receive this subsidy in 2006 have been approved thus far.
"It is telling that 952 lobbyists worked on this bill, they were paid $141 million for their trouble and the take for the big pharmaceutical companies over the next ten years is projected to be $532 billion," said Cleaver. " This bill was clearly not written for the American people it was supposed to benefit. It was written to benefit the drug companies I think that is clear now."
http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/mo05_cleaver/HHSAnnouncesDisappointingMedPartDNumbers.html