More Taxpayer Money+Less Coverage=Republican Policy

I was pleased to discover via iocaste that the WSJ has made this outstanding article available online. Make sure to click through–there’s a detailed explanation with a handy chart, but some choice grafs:

Programs that provide free or deeply discounted drugs for the elderly and the disabled are being eliminated by a number of pharmaceutical companies as the new Medicare drug benefit takes effect, in a move that could cut off many seniors from their medicine.

The drug industry is blaming the federal government for the move. Drug companies cite recent government guidance that says the plans violate laws that bar companies from providing inducements to patients to use their drugs while the government is helping to pay for them. But the government says it never ruled the plans to be illegal, and the companies are ejecting seniors from assistance programs of their own accord.

What is clear is that the new Medicare drug benefit, created to make prescription drugs more affordable for the elderly, is having the unintended effect of making it more expensive, or prohibitive, for some poor older Americans to get their medications.

At least one million people who would have qualified for the industry programs make too much money to get any government assistance to help with the out-of-pocket costs under the new Medicare plan, according to Verispan LLC, a health-care-research company in Yardley, Pa.

[…]

One patient affected by the moves is Bob Stemer, a disabled Medicare participant in Eastpointe, Mich., who has had two kidney transplants. He takes 15 pills at breakfast and seven more at dinner to control his diabetes, poor circulation, high blood pressure and other conditions. Mr. Stemer, who is 54 years old, says his income consists of $14,500 a year in disability payments. He says five drug companies provide him with free drugs that would cost $650 a month otherwise. Recently, three of them notified him that he would no longer be eligible for their programs and recommended he sign up for the Medicare drug plan.

As a result, Mr. Stemer is considering going without some prescriptions because he can’t afford Medicare’s out-of-pocket costs. “I could just either take a little extra insulin or try to watch my blood pressure. … I guess I could live without my blood pressure medication,” he says.

“There are patients who are worse off” under the Medicare plan, says Tracy J. Sims, an Eli Lilly executive who oversees the company’s free-drug programs. Lilly is doing away with the program for poor seniors and disabled patients — also covered under the new plan — that provided $191 million in drugs to 200,000 patients last year. Mr. Sims estimates that about half of those patients will be charged significant out-of-pocket costs for drugs under the new Medicare program.

GlaxoSmithKline says it has notified 200,000 patients in its drug-assistance program that they can’t continue in the program after May 15.

I would call this “inept,” except that this might imply that trying to improve drug coverage for seniors was the primary purpose of the Republican legislation. (And, of course, the complaints from drug companies are also a little problematic–they certainly didn’t seem to be complaining about this legislation in real time, for obvious reasons.)