AU Call on CMA Administrator McClellan to Extend Deadline for costly, confusing Part D
McClellan in Chicago today to promote Part D just day after new GAO report revealing severe problems with Medicare Help Line
Chicago, IL - In response to Dr. Mark McClellan's, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator, visit to Chicago today to promote the costly and confusing Medicare Part D program, Americans United today called on McClellan to tell President Bush and his allies in Congress to extend the May 15th enrollment deadline for Part D so the fatally flawed program can be fixed. McClellan's campaign stop comes on the heels of a new report from the independent Government Accountability Office that revealed the 1-800-MEDICARE hotline gives false, incomplete or inappropriate information one-third of the time and that call waiting times for seniors and disabled lasted for up to an hour.
"Medicare Part D is so badly flawed that the May 15 enrollment deadline must be extended to give Congress time to fix Part D so that our seniors can receive a drug benefit that is simple, affordable, and guaranteed," said Jeremy Funk, spokesman for Americans United. "The new GAO report revealing horrific problems with the administration's Medicare help line, including up to hour long waits on the phone and inaccurate or incomplete responses to one-third of basic questions, is only the latest in a long series of ugly realities about a program written by and for the big drug and insurance companies."
Among the Government Accountability Office's findings:
- Written materials failed to comply with basic guidelines for good communications and were written at an educational level that rendered them unreadable by almost half of all seniors.
- The Medicare website was poorly designed and was so complicated that seniors were typically able to perform less than half of all simple tasks they attempted on the site.
- The 1-800-Medicare hotline provided inaccurate, incomplete, or inappropriate responses to one-third of basic questions.
- On one key question - which plan offered the lowest costs for individuals who take a given set of drugs - the Medicare hotline provided inappropriate, inaccurate, or incomplete answers almost 60% of the time.
"Whether it's prohibiting Medicare from negotiating lower prices with drug companies or the massive doughnut hole leaving millions of seniors with no coverage: the more layers peeled away from Part D the more rotten it appears," added Funk. "Bottom line: the deadline also must be extended to give people more time to sign up without penalty, because it would be immoral to penalize seniors and the disabled for their failure to sign up for a plan that should have never been this difficult and confusing in the first place."
The GAO report is available at http://www.house.gov/stark/news/109th/pressreleases/20060503_GAOReport/GAO-06-654.pdf
A GAO fact sheet summarizing the report is available at http://www.house.gov/stark/news/109th/pressreleases/20060503_GAOReport/20060503_PartD_factsheet.pdf
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