Medicare Drug Bills Assailed by Clinton

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Medicare Drug Bills Assailed by Clinton

By Richard Perez-Peca, the New York Times

October 11, 2003

The bills in Congress to add prescription drug coverage to Medicare would actually raise costs for millions of New Yorkers and result in poorer coverage for many of them, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said on Friday.

Though to many Americans Mrs. Clinton embodies the efforts to expand government-sponsored health coverage, she was one of just 11 Democrats to vote against the Medicare drug bill that the Senate passed in June. She said on Friday that she would oppose any bill that emerged from a House-Senate conference committee, unless the committee came up with a bill more generous than the ones already passed.

"Either version, the Senate or the House, would represent a net loss for most retirees," Mrs. Clinton said at a news conference with union leaders, local officials and Representative Timothy Bishop, Democrat of Suffolk County.

The bills' supporters have disputed some of the numbers behind these claims and conceded the validity of others. But they say that the argument misses the point: that the bills as drafted would be a net gain for Medicare recipients over all by providing significant relief to the people who need it most — those with very high drug costs.

A spokeswoman for the House Ways and Means Committee, whose chairman, Bill Thomas of California , has been the House's leading figure on the prescription drug issue, declined to respond to specific critiques of the bills, and said that Mr. Thomas was not available to be interviewed.

Mrs. Clinton said she thought it was doubtful that the House, which passed a more conservative bill in June, and the Senate would be able to resolve their differences this year.

The news conference was organized by Citizen Action of New York, a liberal advocacy group, in part to release its analysis of the two bills passed in June, an analysis repeatedly cited by the speakers.

The bills "purport to be one thing, but actually are something else," Mr. Bishop said.

Both Congressional bills would impose premiums, deductibles and co-payments for the drug plan on all but the poorest Medicare recipients. For people with modest prescription drug needs, the cost of participating in the plan would exceed what they now spend on medicines. Anyone who spends less than $800 a year on prescription drugs would actually pay more under the House bill; those who spend up to $1,100 would pay more under the Senate bill.

Of the 2.7 million elderly and disabled New Yorkers on Medicare, Citizen Action calculated that 653,000 under the House bill and 784,000 under the Senate version would pay more for prescription drugs.

The existing bills would also increase out-of-pocket costs unrelated to prescription drugs for all but low-income Medicare recipients, including more than two million New Yorkers. Both bills would increase deductibles for doctor visits. The Senate version would also impose a co-payment for laboratory tests.

Some employers who pay for drug coverage for retired former employees would probably drop that benefit if Medicare were to pay for medicines. Using predictions made by the Congressional Budget Office, Citizen Action estimated that more than 300,000 New Yorkers would lose coverage from former employers.

Mrs. Clinton said that at a time when employers are already finding ways to drop medical coverage, the government should not give them an incentive to do so.

Citizen Action also projected that hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers could lose some drug coverage under state-financed programs like Medicaid and New York 's Elderly Pharmaceutical Insurance Program. But those claims are much more speculative because they turn on predictions of how state lawmakers will respond to a Medicare drug benefit.

The Senate bill passed with broad bipartisan support, but Democrats have complained that since the two bills went to the conference committee, they have been shut out of the process. The much more conservative House bill passed by a single vote; just 9 Democrats voted for it and 195 against.