Buried beneath the avalanche of recent news reports about the latest
Obamacare-mandated funding cuts to the Medicare Advantage (MA) program
is a related but far more disturbing story — the Centers for Medicare
and Medicaid Services (CMS) has taken a major step toward rationing
medications to the elderly. Since passage of the Medicare Modernization
Act of 2003, seniors enrolled in the Medicare prescription drug program
have been guaranteed access to “all or substantially all” of the drugs
in several classes of pharmaceuticals. President Obama’s health care
bureaucrats, however, have proposed removing three of these classes from
the “protected” list.
The New York Times reports,
“The administration’s proposal would remove the protected status from…
immunosuppressant drugs used in transplant patients, antidepressants and
antipsychotic medicines.” Yes, you read that correctly. These are drugs
used to facilitate organ transplants and treat patients suffering with
mental illness. The Times names a few of the medicines in
question: “They include many well-known drugs, such as Wellbutrin, Paxil
and Prozac to treat depression, and Abilify and Seroquel to treat
schizophrenia.” There can be little doubt that the next step CMS plans
to take will involve a decision not to cover the most expensive of these
medications at all.
This is why CMS represents this as a
cost-saving measure. But the amount of money these changes will save is
virtually nothing by Medicare standards. Moreover, as Yevgeny Feyman writes in Forbes,
“The likely reduction in therapeutic choices could result in higher
health care costs in other parts of the program, like Part A (for
hospital care) or Part B (for physician services).” Further undermining
the CMS cost-saving claim is that, due to the very market features that
make it unpopular with Beltway bureaucrats, the Medicare prescription
drug program may be the only federal entitlement in history whose costs
have come in below its initial CBO projections.
(Click link below to read more)
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About Me

- Judy Chaffee
- This site is the inspiration of a former reporter/photographer for one of New England's largest daily newspapers and for various magazines. The intent is to direct readers to interesting political articles, and we urge you to visit the source sites. Any comments may be noted on site or directed to KarisChaf at gmail.
Monday, February 24, 2014
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