For starters, coverage is woefully inadequate. You pay a $250 deductible and then a 25 percent co-pay on the first $2,250 of drug benefits each year, plus roughly another $450 a year in premiums. So if your prescriptions cost $2,250 a year, or about $190 a month, for prescriptions, you pay $1,200 a year all told and the plan pays just $1050.
That’s pretty shabby. But then, the truly bizarre feature of the plan kicks in. Coverage simply disappears, until you have spent nearly $3,100 out of pocket. This is the infamous "hole in the donut." Coverage kicks in again only after a total of $5,100 in prescription costs.
A great many seniors will never get the coverage because the plan is a bad bargain, and they just won’t sign up. Of if they do sign up, they will run out of the ability to pay enough out of pocket before qualifying for needed benefits. Even with these disgracefully skimpy benefits, the plan is expected to add over half a trillion to the federal budget over the next decade.
Kevin Drum is right. This looks like a piece of legislation specifically designed to prove that the federal government can’t be trusted to administer healthcare. Of course, the people who believe that the federal government can’t be trusted to administer healthcare …are the same people actually running the federal government and pushing for this bill. So what else do you expect?
There is a popular school of thought that federal government and regulation is inherently bad. That’s all well and good for members of the citizenry, but does that mean we should elect people who dislike federal government to actually be the federal government? That makes about as much sense as having a Christian Scientist become Surgeon General, or (if you prefer) Jane Fonda as Secretary of Defense.