For example, my annual prescription drug costs run round $200 -- never more than $240 -- mostly for blood-pressure medication and occasional antibiotics. But the new "benefit" will cost me $22 per month -- $264 per year -- plus the $250 deductible: this more than doubles my prescription drug costs to $514 per year. And my situation is typical: all seniors with comparably lower drug costs are effectively being forced by the Bush Administration to pay a penalty for being in good health -- literally, a Good Health Tax.
And signing up is mandatory: a penalty of one percent of your pension per month -- for the rest of your life -- if you don't sign up by May 2006.
The purpose, of course, is to reward the prescription drug industry for its generous support of DemoPublican politicians: thus the provisions that forbid group purchasing and thereby require payment of maximum wholesale and retail prices. Quoth
The Washington Post: "The new Medicare drug benefit fails to deliver drug prices as low as those found at...high-volume U.S. pharmacies, a congressional report said yesterday."
The rest of the story, published November 23rd, is here (free registration may be required):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/22/AR2005112201662.html Which is why at every opportunity I have started calling Medicare Part D
the Medicare Prescription Drug Lord Benefit -- for that is exactly what it is: the most outrageous example in U.S. history of taxing the poor to benefit the wealthy.
Moreover, hope the Democrats will change any of this is idiotic pie in the sky: the Democrats are as beholden to the prescription drug lords as are their Republican counterparts. How do you suppose the Medicare Prescription Drug Lord Benefit was enacted? Why do you suppose the Clinton Administration deliberately sandbagged national health-care reform by holding the hearings in secret and tying the enactment of single-payer insurance to forcible disarmament of the civilian population? Surely no one believes seasoned political operatives like the Clintons could make such an error "accidentally."
No, the bitter fact is that we seniors are permanently fucked -- robbed specifically to put more money in the pockets of people who are already obscenely wealthy.
(Edit: head changed to avoid apparent agreement with factually incorrect post above.)