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Insurers told to provide Medicare drugs -- NY Times
In a directive sent to all Medicare drug plans over the weekend, the Bush administration also said insurers "must take immediate steps" to ensure that low-income beneficiaries were not charged more than $2 for a generic drug and $5 for a brand-name drug, according to the Times.
The actions came after several states declared public health emergencies, and many states announced that they would step in to pay for prescriptions that should have been covered by Medicare's new prescription drug program, which started on January 1, the Times said.
People who had signed up for coverage found that they were not on the government's list of subscribers and insurers said they had no way to identify poor people entitled to extra help with their drug costs, the paper reported.
Dr. Mark McClellan, administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told the Times that "several hundred thousand beneficiaries who switched plans" in December may have had difficulty filling prescriptions in the last two weeks.
Despite these problems, Medicare is now covering one million prescriptions a day, McClellan said. With the latest corrective actions, "all beneficiaries should be able to get their prescriptions filled," McClellan told the paper.
About 20 states, including California, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania and all of New England, have announced that they will help low-income people by paying drug claims that should have been paid by the federal Medicare program, the Times said.
"The new federal program is too complicated for many people to understand, and the implementation of the new program by the federal government has been awful," said Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican. On Saturday, he signed an emergency executive order making the state a "payer of last resort" for the out-of-pocket drug costs, the Times reported.
Any of the 42 million Medicare beneficiaries can sign up for the new drug coverage. Federal officials say that a surge in enrollments occurred in late December. About 6.2 million low-income people who had drug coverage under Medicaid were automatically enrolled in Medicare drug plans, and some of them have switched to other Medicare plans, the Times said.