Word: medicaid
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Republicans hope it isn't so, but the new Medicare prescription drug program may be having more than just start-up problems. Top officials at the Health and Human Service Department and its Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are scrambling to fix computer snafus that have resulted in many of the some 6.4 million low-income seniors being turned away or overcharged as they are forced to shift from Medicaid drug coverage to the confounding new prescription drug program. And no one hopes more that they'll be fixed than George Bush and Congressional Republicans, who two years...
...Academy's regulations, which are about as byzantine as Medicaid rules, disqualify a film that's been shown on TV before its theatrical opening. So Why We Fight was out, because it had aired on the BBC (which co-produced it). As for Grizzly Man, we guess the selectors just didn't like it. Arthur Dong, a governor of the Academy's documentary branch, can't say why any film was refused because "we don't discuss the films among ourselves." But could he give his own opinion of Grizzly...
...was simply a woman with more than her fair share of sickness. With multiple birth defects, chronic pain, asthma and bipolar disorder, Patterson, 35, struggled to get by on $832 a month in disability assistance. But at least one thing in her life was taken care of. California's Medicaid program paid for more than a dozen medications every month. "I always got my meds on time," she says. That changed on Jan. 1, when Medicare's prescription-drug benefit went into effect. Patterson was one of 6.2 million people automatically shifted into the program from Medicaid, and her story...
...sudden change are thinking twice. "Katrina showed government's failure to respond, and we can't afford those failures again," says Republican Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota. A quarter of the 24 million people now enrolled in Medicare Part D are "dual eligibles," people who qualify for both Medicaid and Medicare. In other words, they are among the poorest and frailest people in the country. More than 70% of them make less than $10,000 a year; 372,000 of them have Alzheimer's. Republicans realize that after Katrina, they cannot risk another crisis in which the government appears...
...bewildered seniors trying to choose. But that confusion is only part of what has gone wrong. The main reason for the problems of the past three weeks is that the vast majority of enrollees--20.4 million of 24 million--already had some kind of drug benefit, in many cases Medicaid, and were automatically switched to Part D. Their information had to make its way through several layers of private and public bureaucracy for the new system to work. Medicare allowed people to sign up for Part D until Dec. 31 for coverage on Jan. 1, but insurers couldn't process...