Medicare and Cutbacks: Don’t Anger the Seniors as they Will Eat Your Babies
In an ongoing series of posts about the facts of healthcare, we thought it important—especially in the Florida market—to discuss how the health care reform bill will affect seniors, especially those who rely on Medicare.
The President, and Congress, are both talking about cutting Medicare, which by definition is bad for seniors who rely on the program, right?
Not necessarily. If we continue as we are, by 2019 (ten years from now) spending on Medicare and Medicaid would be 8% of GDP which the country simply cannot afford. It’s estimated, though, that the program would run out of money far before then.
The “cuts” to Medicare would primarily be to the insurance subsidies—which are in the hundreds of millions of dollars—and don’t affect patient care at all (they just affect insurance company’s profit ratios and bottom lines).
The other changes to Medicare are positives for seniors—one, an emphasis on bringing generic drug alternatives to market in shorter time window than at present. Generic drugs can cost a fraction of the drug company alternatives. Drug companies do bear quite a cost to bring a new drug to market (research and development, testing, etc) and deserve the right to recoup some of those costs with a window of “exclusivity”. However, the reforms will shrink that window so that seniors, especially, need not make the decision to forgo prescriptions if they seem too expensive.
An emphasis will be made as well to provide for preventative care—reducing co-payments for checkups and wellness visits. If a disease or condition is caught in its early stages the cost of treatment is often dramatically reduced over catching it later; the savings for this simple step of reducing the copay on checkups means that seniors, on a fixed income, don’t need to put off doctor’s visits until it is too late (and much more expensive).
Another key point: health reform is targeted to provide financial help for employer health plans to cover early retirees; one of the difficult facts of this economy is that many have chosen, or been forced into, retirement earlier than 62 and have no option for health insurance beyond paying for COBRA at expensive rates or buying private insurance. With further incentives to companies to help provide health insurance for these early retirees, costs can be better-managed and can save families hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.
There’s a lot of waste in the system today; if health care reform can eliminate some of that waste, it will benefit all Americans.
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