Imagine living with the devastating diagnosis of HIV/AIDS. Then imagine that the price tag of your monthly antiviral medications quickly exhausts your Medicare prescription coverage and leaves you living life in the gap. Not only must you wage an aggressive offensive to safeguard and manage your health, but also you are left naked to bear the brunt of the financial cost of the disease. Living life in the balance, wedged between necessity and cost, sadly has placed good health at too high a price for some of the most vulnerable among us. For many, the pang of the health-care crunch is felt not at the doctor's office but when paying for prescription medicines.
In the above scenario, after signing up for Medicare Part D in January, the elderly patient's prescription coverage had been devoured by February, leaving the patient to purchase pricey antiviral drugs out of pocket, or, worse, out of retirement savings. Only after spending thousands of dollars and consuming personal funds previously allotted to stay afloat did Medicare kick back in and offer much-needed assistance. This is but one story out of the many seniors who exist in the Medicare coverage gap. Unfortunately, too many Americans face desperate choices in what has become a health-care system replete with ironies.
Given these realities on the ground, Monday's announcement by the White House that drug manufacturers will extend $80 billion over the next decade to soften the blow to the nation's pocketbook (by discounting prescription drugs to seniors and the disabled), serves as a welcome down payment of sorts on health-care reform. Though not a guarantee, the deal is a genuine start by the pharmaceutical industry, in what is becoming a piecemeal approach to tackle the trillion-dollar gorilla in the room.
Buy-in from drug companies is necessary, long overdue and the least the highly-profitable pharmaceutical sector can offer the American public. Still, the question looms: why not make the pledge without any precondition on passage of health-care legislation? Does this give "big pharma" wiggle room, a convenient out if Congress fails to reciprocate its gesture? Or does this move create incentive for the cast of decision makers-- insurance companies, legislators and the American Medical Association included --- to budge from their respective perches? The jury is still out. However, I am heartened that a health care stalemate which seemed prematurely scripted a few days earlier is thawing and that policymakers once again are being held to task to employ strategy to capitalize on public will.
We must choose to look upon those nameless and faceless lives lived in the balance. As Obama stated earlier this month, we have "a moral and economic imperative" to act and show resolve. And we must commit to heart that empathy is not the enemy of reason.
Medicare is socialized medicine. Those opposed to socialized medicine should oppose this socialism.
If they do not, and are against health care reform, they are hypocrites
I know I said I would sit this one out, but statements like this by an MD have to be refuted. The question is not whether Medicare is now fully funded, but whether we can afford to keep Medicare as it is. As a matter of fact we can. I reproduce below a calculation by Uwe Reinhardt that shows that under very conservative assumptions, we will have 70% more money (in real dollars) after paying for Medicare in 2050 than we have now after paying for Medicare. The problem lies in the enormous waste of private insurance. There is so much waste there in high overhead and compliance costs, that we could give an improved Medicare to everyone and it would not cost us anymore than we are now paying, probably less.
Here is Uwe's calculation:
"If "economic sustainability," then exactly what do people have in mind with that phrase? During the past 4 decades or so, the long-run, smoothed average annual growth rate in real (inflation-adjusted) GDP per capita has been about 2%. Suppose that fell to only 1.5% for the next four decades. The current average real GDP per capita of about $40,000 would then grow to about $72,500 by 2050 in constant-dollar terms. Medicare now absorbs about 3% of GDP, leaving a non-Medicare real per capita GDP of $38,800. It was estimated by the CBO about a year ago that Medicare will absorb about 9% of GDP by 2050. Let’s make that 10%. At these numbers, the non-Medicare real GDP per capita available to today’s little critters who will run America in 2050 will still be close to 70% larger than is our current non-Medicare GDP per capita."