TRYING HARD TO MAKE CHICKEN SALAD

Senate Panel Approves Medicare Plan With Prescription Coverage: House Version Offers Similar Benefits (Amy Goldstein and Helen Dewar, June 13, 2003, Washington Post)

The Senate Finance Committee, after splintering over Medicare's future for years, approved legislation last night that would help all older Americans pay for prescription drugs while also expanding the role of private health plans in treating the nation's seniors.

Starting in three years, the measure would offer subsidies to help Medicare's 40 million recipients buy insurance for medicine or to obtain the same drug coverage through private health plans, such as preferred-provider networks. The private plans would include other coverage more generous than Medicare traditionally has provided, including extra preventive care and new limits on out-of-pocket expenditures for patients with especially big medical bills. [...]

The House plan would cost the same, but would design drug benefits differently. For one thing, higher-income Medicare recipients would pay more for medicine. The House plan also would set up greater price competition between the traditional fee-for-service Medicare program and private health plans, and it would create economic incentives not found in the Senate bill for patients to join private plans. [...]

In one of the most significant differences, the House plan would require people with incomes above $60,000 -- or couples making more than $120,000 -- to pay more before they could start receiving catastrophic coverage. "People who make $120,000 a couple in retirement should at least be expected to pay a couple more dollars out of their own pocket . . . so the programs can work well for all," said House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.).

Adding prescription drug coverage is a bad idea any way you slice it, but establishing some kind of means testing and beginning the transition to private plans make the best of a bad situation. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 13, 2003 6:36 PM