Medicare is the US program for providing health care to the disabled and people over 65 years of age. It works pretty darned well, but rest assured that it is not “socialism” because it’s an “entitlement.” If we offered it to people who weren’t disabled or over 65, then it would be socialist and the next thing you know we’d be moving the White House to Moscow and we’d all by driving a Trabant.
For most of its existence, Medicare did not cover prescription drugs. Late in the twentieth century, however, prescription drugs were becoming a major part of health care costs and many seniors were going bankrupt or dying due to lack of coverage. In 2006, Medicare added prescription drug coverage to address this inhumane situation.
Of course, we couldn’t have socialism so, instead, Medicare Part D was designed to be administered by the private sector (you know, the efficient private sector brought to us by folks like Jeffery Skilling [Enron], Bernard Ebbers [Worldcom], Bernie Madoff, Adelphia, Dennis Kozlowski and Mark Swartz [Tyco], Richard Scrushy [HealthSouth], Jack Abramoff, Angelo Mozilo [Countrywide]…). We ended up with something like seventy different private prescription drug plans. So now you’re a sick, elderly person with little knowledge of the health care system who must choose among seventy different programs, each with dozens of pages of fine-print exclusions and restrictions.
But don’t worry! There is a tool where each of the plans will give you a summary like that above, showing you what your costs will be if you choose their plan. So you enter in your prescriptions, and you get a customized breakdown of what their policy will do for you. It makes it simple to pick a plan. Except…
All of the plans came up with more-or-less the same numbers for me: I’d be paying nearly $30,000 out of pocket for my truly modest collection of generic prescription drugs. And here’s the problem: I hate health insurance companies and I can’t stand dealing with them. I’ve always been able to get by with generic medications, and I’ve never bothered to use my insurance. The exact same list of drugs that will cost me almost $30k with insurance cost me right around $1,000 last year without using insurance. Had I used my insurance last year, I’d be $29,000 poorer.
Naturally, though, there’s a provision that you must keep an active policy or you get a lifetime penalty in the form of higher premiums going forward. That could be a real killer if I needed, say, some pricey chemotherapy drug in the future. Fortunately, there are policies that cost under $1/month, though they tend to jack the price way up the following year if you don’t pay attention and switch during the next open enrollment.
The moral of the story is always shop around when you’re buying prescription drugs. Generic drugs can often be purchased for cash for less than your insurance co-pay. And when your pharmacy and insurance company gives you that piece of paper that says “You saved $8,192 dollars by using your insurance on this prescription,” it’s a lie.
—2p