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Medicare Reform Plan's Prescription Drug Coverage Unreliable, Needlessly Complex, and Insufficient. |
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GREEN PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES Contacts: Only single-payer national health insurance can provide effective, cost-efficient coverage for seniors and all other Americans, say Greens. WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Greens sharply criticized Congress's Medicare reform legislation, calling current Senate and House plans a distraction from the more urgent goal of enacting a comprehensive national health insurance plan. While it's necessary to add prescription drug benefits to the current Medicare system, say Greens, the draft legislation is insufficient in its coverage of older Americans, needlessly complex, and may ultimately prove unworkable. "Congress is unwilling to take on the powerful pharmaceutical lobbies, as well as insurance firms and HMOs, and that's why older Americans aren't getting the assistance they need," said Ron Forthofer, 2002 Colorado Green gubernatorial candidate, former professor of biostatistics at the University of Texas, and board member of Health Care for All Colorado. "It's why many seniors are traveling to Canada and Mexico for their prescriptions. According to Families USA, prices for the most popular prescription drugs for seniors rose almost 3 1/2 times the rate of inflation in the last year. Can you imagine the price reductions if Congress took advantage of the collective negotiating power of 40 million Medicare recipients?" "This legislation will endanger Medicare by forcing it into unfair competition with private health plans, effectively channeling public money into corporate bank accounts," added Forthofer. "Many seniors will see their generous private coverage canceled when government-funded coverage kicks in. For some seniors, coverage would get phased out above a certain level of individual expenditure -- and phased in again at the next higher level, according to complex rules." Greens note that most pharmaceutical research is paid for with taxpayers' money, with over $10 billion in federal funding spent annually on drug research throughout the 1990s. According to Public Citizen, 85% of all the pharmaceutical research, including testing, for the top five drugs of 1995 was funded with taxpayer dollars. American seniors have spent their whole lives paying for drug research, say Greens, and deserve the benefits of the research they paid for. According to Public Citizen, the drug industry hired 675 different lobbyists from 138 firms in 2002 (nearly seven lobbyists for each senator), and spent $91 million on lobbying activities the same year, 12% more than 2001. They persuaded Congress not to include a prescription drug benefit in the traditional Medicare program, and instead convinced Congress to have drug coverage provided by corporate insurers and HMOs. This weakens the power of 40 million Medicare beneficiaries to negotiate for lower drug prices. "The pundits are saying that President Bush and Republicans in Congress have wrested the issue of health care reform away from their Democratic competition in 2004," said Bill Edstrom, biologist at Columbia University and a New York Green. "What it really proves is that the only reforms most politicians in either party will consider are those that involve privatization. The Green Party calls for single-payer national health coverage, which would provide quality universal coverage regardless of ability to pay, age, or prior medical condition. Every other democratic nation covers its citizens based on some variation of this plan. National health insurance was a goal of the Democrats since 1948, until Clinton banished it in favor of corporate-based managed care in 1993. Greens are putting it back on the national agenda." NOTE: The Green Party of the United States will hold
its 2003 national meeting at the Mayflower Hotel, 1127 Connecticut
Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. from Friday, July 18 through Sunday, July
20. For media registration for the conference, visit http://www.gp.org/forms/conf2003form.html.
For more information about the conference, visit http://www.gp.org/conference2003.html.
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