Old Medicare, Good, New Medicare Very, Very Bad

As you can tell from my last post, I like Medicare, mostly because it's a hell of a deal. For just short of $6100 per person per year, every single old and disabled person in this country gets complete health coverage. That's about $1000 less than Blue Cross/Blue Shield of California would charge to insure a healthy 64 year old with a policy they would cancel the moment the person actually got sick. More coverage for less money. So much for the myth of a bloated, inefficient government bureaucracy.

Let me be clear that I am not talking about the new Part D(isaster) drug benefit. For some reason (hint: $600,000,000 spent by the health industry in the political process over 3 years) "our" Congressional Representatives and members of Congress are married to the idea that private industry can always do everything better than the public sector. Go call your health insurance company right now. After you spend an hour listening to how "your call is very important to us" let me know what you think of the lean, mean efficiency of the corporate way of doing things. These are the people your government put in charge of the new Medicare drug benefit, and anyone who has been paying attention has seen the disasterous results. Confused, angry oldsters who simply wanted to sign up wading through oceans of information trying to figure out how not to get screwed. Worse yet, confused, angry oldsters bothering me expecting me to straighten them out when I barely have time to take a piss at work. The parents of the fucking Secretary of Health and Human Services couldn't figure out which plan was best for them, even with the help of their son, the SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES. Just mention the words "Medicare part D" to any pharmacy employee and enjoy the post traumatic stress disorder you'll witness.

But at least we got everyone covered you might be saying, and our seniors are getting some relief from crippling drug prices, and society is probably saving some money on our collective drug bill by buying in bulk, right? Um, no.

Almost 10 million eligible people missed Monday's deadline to sign up for coverage.

Twenty-three percent of seniors and people with disabilities are paying more for prescription drugs than they did before enrolling in a Medicare Part D plan.

Prices under the private drug plans in Part D are 75 percent higher than those negotiated by the Veterans Administration, 5 percent higher than at Drugstore.com, and 2 percent higher than at Costco. We would have been better off totally eliminating the "Pharmacy Benefit Managers" from the process and just having seniors go to a warehouse club and send in the bill.

Let me recap this because it goes so counter to the propaganda you'll hear from Fox news and the army of right wing hacks that dominate the AM radio dial. Old Medicare; completely government run. Costs less. Returns more. New Medicare; a public/private hybrid monster, bleeding the taxpayer dry and delivering shit for service.

This is what happens when your public servants are bought and paid for by corporations. This is what happens when they care more about how they'll fund their next campaign than what's best for the country. The corporations write the checks to the campaign committees, but we all pay the price.

Read more here and here if you want.