I heard a report the other day about the new medicare prescription drug benefit choices and the donut hole trap for for many seniors.
Weak as the various plans are, several of them have lapses of coverage. You’re covered for several thousand dollars worth of medecine, but the next several thousand you have to pay out of pocket until coverage resumes again, and you begin again the next year.
They’re calling it the donut hole. On this report we heard from a couple senior citizens and the terrible financial troubles which come of overcoming the donut hole in their coverage.
The reporter said “no one knows how many people fall into the donut hole.”
Really now? That would have to be the least imaginative investigative reporting ever. Did the reporter think this donut hole is like a back street pot hole claiming its unwarry victims without rhyme or reason?
The reporter would be right about the unwarry victims, but that’s not some random neglected pot hole. That pot hole represents a windfall profit of billions of dollars for the insurance companies who before the medicare reforms had to pay it. They know exactly how many billions are now flowing their way. They know how many millions of people are affected, even their names and prescriptions, because they used to pay for those prescriptions.
What is the purpose of all the complicated medicare drug benefit options? To obscure the fact that each one is intended to screw the senior citizen, but they’ll be dead before they figure that out?
The various complicated plans are the result of the calculations of giant actuarial scenarios in which drug companies and insurers achieve maximum revenue. Trying to figure out which plan might work to your advantage is like pitting yourself against IBM’s Deep Blue. Pencil and legal pad against a supercomputer.
I had intended to remind readers on the onset of this article, and between each paragraph, that health care is free in every other developed nation. Prescriptions, house calls, open heart surgery, free.
Those countries don’t bother with health insurance businesses which skim a third of all health care costs. They don’t bother with kickbacks to corrupt politicians who pass legislation to benefit corporations over public citizens.
Other countries health care and medicines are free.
Do you understand why there need to be dozens of different drug plans, any of which can be discontinued immediately if they don’t suit the drug companies? Does it make sense? That each plan is so complicated you need a super computer to calculate your options?
They devise the plans with the aid of super computers with probability factors including your chances of getting away without paying an arm and a leg. Your chances? Known only to them.
You’re screwed. Unless you live in any other developed nation. Any.