SALON

Friday, Sep 8, 2000 7:00 PM UTC

Prescription politics

What's the difference between the Bush and Gore health plans?

By

Topics: George W. Bush, Healthcare Reform, Al Gore,

Prescription politics

In laying out what would be the most radical reform of the Medicare program in its 35-year history, Texas Gov. George W. Bush has offered a bold alternative to the plan offered by Democrat Al Gore. But Bush’s plan is difficult to explain and may be difficult to sell, and it is fraught with political risks.

Bush not only wants to provide senior citizens a drug benefit; he also wants to change the basic structure of Medicare by having the federal program compete with a smorgasbord of new government-subsidized HMOs and insurance plans.

Bush’s free-market proposal, which closely tracks a bill favored by Republicans in Congress, is sure to appeal to the party faithful. It attacks what Republicans see as Medicare’s “big government,” “one-size-fits-all” approach to healthcare. Yet it is not at all clear that Medicare’s 39 million elderly and disabled beneficiaries are anywhere near as disillusioned with the program as Bush and more conservative members of his party who have long viewed Medicare as the prologue to socialized medicine.

The bigger problem with Bush’s proposal, and the reason it’s so politically risky, is that it provides no guarantee that all seniors would get the drug benefit he says he wants to give them.

Bush’s plan allows seniors to stay within the existing Medicare system — which provides only in-hospital drug benefits — if they choose to. But Bush can’t tell those who opt for one of the new insurance plans how much coverage they’ll get or how much they’ll have to pay for it because those new drug plans don’t yet exist. Furthermore, it’s not at all clear that the insurance industry would find drug insurance a profitable venture. Many private insurers have already indicated that drug coverage programs would be uneconomical because the only people who would want to buy them would be people with large prescription bills.

In short, the Bush proposal risks creating substantial uncertainty among seniors who are looking for rock-solid guarantees that their health needs, and particularly their prescription drug costs, will be provided for. Whether Bush can sell a plan which remains something of a pig in a poke remains to be seen.

Gore’s program, which he has been heavily promoting for the past month, is relatively simple and straightforward by comparison: provide all seniors a new, heavily subsidized entitlement, a drug benefit under an expanded Medicare program.

During each of the past five years the cost of prescription medications has risen anywhere from 10 to 14 percent, and prices are projected to rise another 10 percent annually until 2008. About a third of Medicare patients have no drug coverage at all, and many insurance plans for those who are covered provide only limited benefits.

Although both the Gore and Bush drug plans are voluntary, Gore’s plan is much more expensive and much more generous in its benefits. The total cost of Gore’s drug benefit plan is estimated to run $253 billion over 10 years, whereas Bush’s plan would cost $198 billion over 10 years.

Both Gore and Bush would provide free drug coverage for the poorest Medicare recipients, individuals making less than $11,300 a year. Those with higher incomes would have to pay half their premiums under Gore but 75 percent under Bush. It is that provision that leads Gore to charge that Bush “leaves millions of seniors without any prescription drug coverage.”

Kenneth Thorpe, a professor of health policy at Emory University estimates that nearly all of the 11.7 million Medicare recipients who currently have no drug coverage would enroll in the Gore plan whereas only 3.8 million would choose to enroll in the Bush plan. The lower participation in Bush’s plan is attributable to the relatively small 25 percent federal premium coverage.

Both Gore and Bush would also provide what is known as “catastrophic” coverage, paying for all prescription drug costs once they reach a certain threshold. But for Bush an individual would have to spend $6,000 a year out of pocket before the government would take over, while Gore would start picking up the tab once expenses rose above $4,000 in a single year. On this provision Thorpe projects that Bush’s proposal would help only about 300,000 Medicare recipients while Gore’s would help 2.7 million.

What would seniors have to spend for premiums under Bush’s voluntary drug benefit plan? This largely depends on the private insurance companies. His own lack of precision hasn’t stopped Bush from running down Gore’s premium proposal, which Bush says would require seniors to pay more in annual fees than they receive in benefits. Gore would require seniors to pay $25 a month starting in 2002, but the amount would rise to more than $50 a month by 2009. Similarly, Gore specifies that the government would pay half of a senior’s annual drug bill ($1,000 of $2,000 in 2002, rising to $2,500 out of $5,000 in 2008), while the amount of this so-called co-payment under Bush’s plan is left unstated.

While the Gore proposal would not take effect until 2002, assuming it were to win approval in Congress, Bush proposes sending $48 billion to the states starting as early as next year to help pay for prescription drugs for the poorest seniors and those with particularly large prescription bills. This interim measure is designed to allow states to get a head start on addressing the problem while Congress fashions a comprehensive national program to take effect in 2004. Fourteen states currently have some form of prescription drug assistance for the elderly (though Texas is not among them). But the coverage of state programs is generally quite limited. And it is not at all clear what kind of coverage they would get with Bush’s $48 billion “Immediate Helping Hand” program.

Fearing it could lead to government-mandated pricing, the nation’s leading drug manufacturers have sharply criticized the Gore plan. And indeed the Gore plan would give the federal government enormous bargaining leverage because they would be negotiating prices on behalf of literally millions of consumers. Of course, the large HMOs and hospital chains already exert considerable leverage of their own in this regard, and that leverage would almost certainly increase under Bush’s plan as well. Nevertheless, from the drug industry’s point of view, the Gore plan is clearly more threatening.

While in the coming weeks we’ll surely be hearing all about how these two plans differ, neither addresses the long-term issues of putting Medicare on a more sound financial footing. Over the next 30 years, the number of Americans covered by the program is expected to double, while the number of those paying into the program declines.

Given the importance of the senior vote in the upcoming election and the volatility of the drug price issue, it is not at all clear why Bush waited as long as he did to come forward with a proposal. Until this week his vague commitment to reform Medicare and provide seniors with a drug benefit left him vulnerable to a steady stream of attacks by Gore. Now he has proposed a drug plan that is in many ways less generous than one already approved by congressional Republicans. Does he really think this will help him get the senior vote?

Alan Berlow is the author of "Dead Season: A Story of Murder and Revenge." His writing has appeared in the The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly and Harper's. More Alan Berlow.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations