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Kucinich Introduces Bill to Improve
Medicare’s Prescription Drug Plan
Rep. Dennis KucinichWashington, Aug 4 - Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) introduced a bill to replace the current Medicare drug plan.
H.R. 6800, The Medicare Drugs for Seniors Act, or MEDS Act, allows citizens to purchase their prescription drugs from an approved list of foreign countries, where those drugs sell for considerably less. The bill also requires that Medicare use its bulk purchasing power to negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry, like the Department of Veterans Affairs does. Finally, the bill would impose limits on prices pharmaceutical companies would be allowed to charge, if the research and development that led to the drug’s discovery had been financed by taxpayer dollars.Other features of the bill include: no premiums, no co-pays and no deductibles for drugs required by Medicare recipients.
“This is a common sense bill. Medicare beneficiaries want their prescription drugs without having to navigate complicated maze of choices and stealth loopholes. They want a plan that will not drive them into bankruptcy. The MEDS Act does that.”
On July 24, 2008, the Oversight and Government Reform Committee released an analysis, prepared at the request of Congressman Kucinich and other Committee Members, which showed that pharmaceuticals covered under Part D cost 30% more than pharmaceuticals provided through Medicaid. Medicaid’s program is administered by the federal government while Medicare Part D uses private insurance companies.
“The privatized drug plan has been given a chance and, as predicted, it has failed. There is no reason for us to keep throwing money at a bad idea when we know we can save taxpayers billions of dollars and give seniors the medication they need. I am proud to offer a plan that achieves that goal,” Kucinich said.
Medicare Pays More For Medications Under Part D Plans
8/8/08 - An analysis of confidential data on Medicare Part D and Medicaid drug prices by the majority staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform reported that private Medicare Part D insurers pay significantly higher prices for prescription drugs than does the Medicaid program. According to the committee report, for the six million dual eligible beneficiaries, the Part D insurers paid $3.7 billion more in 2006 and 2007 to purchase the top 100 drugs than they would have paid if they had access to the lower Medicaid drug prices. Eliminating this drug manufacturer windfall over the next 10 years would save taxpayers $86 billion if the Medicare Part D insurers paid Medicaid prices for drugs used by their dual eligible beneficiaries.
At a July 24, 2008, hearing, Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said drug manufacturers have been paid billions more for the drugs used by the dual eligible beneficiaries than they would have been paid if their coverage had remained under Medicaid. He announced that he plans to introduce legislation to prevent taxpayers from paying for these higher drug costs. Waxman noted that the committee found out last October that the private insurers that deliver the Medicare drug benefit are charging taxpayers and beneficiaries $4.6 billion in administrative costs annually. “The Part D program is exceptionally lucrative for the private health insurers,” he said.
Price comparison
The majority staff reports, that in 2006 and 2007, the private Part D insurers spent $18.7 billion to purchase the top 100 drugs for dual eligible beneficiaries. If the private Part D insurers had paid the same prices as Medicaid, their total cost for the drugs used by the dual eligible beneficiaries would have been $12.4 billion. The price increases were especially large for the drugs on CMS' "protected list," such as anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, and AIDS drugs, that CMS requires all Medicare Part D plans to offer. For the 16 drugs among the top 100 that are on the protected list, the private Medicare Part D insurers obtained rebates and discounts of only 7 percent, paying almost 40 percent more for these essential medications than Medicaid pays.
Windfalls
According to the report, there are 29 large drug manufacturers who produce the 100 drugs used most often by dual eligible beneficiaries. In total, these manufacturers received $3.7 billion more from the Medicare Part D insurers in 2006 and 2007 than they would have received if the dual eligible beneficiaries had obtained the drugs through Medicaid. Each of nine drugs generated over $100 million more in revenues under the Medicare Part D program than they would have generated had Part D insurers been able to get the same discounts that Medicaid gets.
Cost-saving estimates
Taxpayers presently pay over 98 percent of the drug costs under Medicare Part D. Dual eligible beneficiaries are expected to use $432 billion worth of drugs over the next 10 years. If drug manufacturers provided the Medicare Part D program with the same prices that Medicaid receives, these drug costs could be reduced by as much as $86 billion. If Medicare Part D paid the same price as Medicaid for all drug purchases, the total savings to the taxpayer over the next ten years could be as much as $156 billion. Beneficiaries could also save up to $27 billion.
Source: CCH Washington Bureau, July, 2008.
For more information on this and related topics, consult the CCH® Medicare and Medicaid Guide.
Aging Impairs The 'Replay' Of Memories During SleepScienceDaily (Aug. 1, 2008) — Aging impairs the consolidation of memories during sleep, a process important in converting new memories into long-term ones, according to new animal research in the July 30 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The findings shed light on normal memory mechanisms and how they are disrupted by aging.
During sleep, the hippocampus, a brain region important in learning and memory, repeatedly "replays" brain activity from recent awake experiences. This replay process is believed to be important for memory consolidation. In the new study, Carol Barnes, PhD, and colleagues at the University of Arizona found reduced replay activity during sleep in old compared to young rats, and rats with the least replay activity performed the worst in tests of spatial memory.
Barnes and colleagues recorded hippocampal activity in 11 young and 11 old rats as they navigated several mazes for food rewards. Later, when the animals were asleep, the researchers recorded their hippocampal activity again. In the young animals, the sequence of neural activity recorded while the animals navigated the mazes was repeated when they slept. However, in most of the old animals, the sequence of neural activity recorded during sleep did not reflect the sequence of brain activity recorded in the maze.
"These findings suggest that some of the memory impairment experienced during aging could involve a reduction in the automatic process of experience replay," said Michael Hasselmo, DPhil, at Boston University, an expert unaffiliated with the study.
Animals with more faithful sleep replay also performed better on memory tests. The researchers tested the same 22 rats on a spatial learning and memory task. Consistent with previous research, the young rats recalled the solution to the spatial task faster and more accurately than the old rats. In the old group, the researchers found that the top performers in the spatial memory task were also the ones that showed the best sleep replay. Irrespective of the animal's age, the researchers found that animals who more faithfully replayed the sequence of neural activity recorded in the maze while asleep also performed better on the spatial memory task.
"This is the first study to suggest that an animal's ability to perform a spatial memory task may be related to the brain's ability to perform memory consolidation during sleep," said study author Barnes.
Identification of the specific memory deficit present in the aging brain may be a first step to preventing age-related memory loss. "This study's findings could inspire the development and testing of pharmacological agents designed to enhance memory replay phenomena," Hasselmo said.
The research was supported by the Arizona Chapter of the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists Foundation and The McKnight Brain Research Foundation.
Adapted from materials provided by Society for Neuroscience, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
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