MRC Letter to Congress               


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  • Policy brief
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    May 29, 2003


    Dear Members of Congress:

    The Medicare Rights Center (MRC) is a national consumer service organization committed to ensuring that older and disabled Americans have access to good, affordable health care, including prescription drugs. Since 1989, MRC has assisted tens of thousands of men and women with Medicare. Our clients' greatest unmet health care need, and that of older and disabled Americans in general, is affordable prescription medicine. Thousands are suffering and some are dying because they cannot afford critical medications. We urge you to expand the Medicare benefit package to include prescription drugs.

    Only an expansion of the Medicare benefit package to include good prescription drug coverage will ensure that all people with Medicare get life-sustaining drugs. As part of the Medicare benefit package, prescription drug coverage would be available to the 36 million older and disabled Americans who choose traditional Medicare as well as to the five million individuals who are willing and able to enroll in a Medicare private plan.

    All the data and empirical evidence indicate that current proposals to offer prescription drug coverage to people only through private health plans or stand-alone drug policies would both cost the Medicare program significantly more money and shift more costs and provide less reliable coverage to people with Medicare. Medicare+Choice plans spend more money per enrollee and are far more costly than traditional Medicare.

    Moreover, unlike traditional Medicare, privately-run prescription drug plans are inherently unreliable because of the nature of the health insurance marketplace. History and recent experience confirm that private insurers struggle to turn a profit selling coverage to people with costly health care needs, generally forcing insurers either to charge high premiums and copays or to forego offering coverage altogether.

    Insurance companies have never offered stand-alone prescription drug policies to working people, let alone to older and disabled Americans. And, even if these policies were available with a substantial government subsidy, there is strong evidence questioning the cost-effectiveness of this product compared with coverage through Medicare.

    Medicare should be updated with a prescription drug benefit. That obligation does not create a license to tamper with the sound structure of the Medicare program.

    Please advise us of what you consider to be the needed structure and minimal benefit of a Medicare prescription drug benefit that you will support.

    Sincerely,

    Robert M. Hayes
    President
    Medicare Rights Center

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