Medicare drug card enrollments burgeoning
WASHINGTON — More than 3 million Americans have signed up for Medicare drug discount cards, but confusion persists, a Senate panel was told Tuesday.
Medicare chief Mark McClellan and supportive lawmakers said problems were expected in a program launched less than six months after the Medicare law was enacted, but congestion on telephone lines and other problems were abating.
“Medicare beneficiaries … can now get prices for their prescriptions that are significantly less than Americans generally pay,” McClellan told the Senate Finance Committee a week after the cards took effect.
About 2.4 million of the 3 million-plus enrollees are members of health maintenance organizations who were enrolled automatically in their HMOs’ card programs, McClellan said. Another 400,000 low-income Medicare recipients, who already receive help with their prescriptions, are in the process of being enrolled by state drug assistance programs, he said.
However, McClellan acknowledged that many people remain confused about the program and attributed some of the confusion to misinformation distributed by the law’s critics.
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the committee chairman, went even further. “The drug discount card program has been the target of a deliberate campaign to discredit it and confuse seniors about how it works,” Grassley said.
The most extensive publicity effort, however, belongs to the Bush administration. It has spent about $50 million so far for television and other media advertising campaigns. The most widely seen critical advertisements were aired by AARP, the largest advocacy organization for older Americans, which backed the Medicare legislation last fall. AARP’s ad highlights the law’s complexity and suggests that AARP can make it understandable.
Several lawmakers and an array of seniors’ advocates, including some supporters of the Medicare law, said the card program is complicated and time-consuming to explain. They pressed McClellan to expand automatic enrollment of low-income beneficiaries.
“It’s taking a careful review to determine if the cards are a good thing,” said Kris Gross, director of the Iowa Senior Health Insurance Program.