Congressional Democrats and some senior citizens’ groups have urged President Bush to extend the looming Monday deadline for seniors to enroll in the new Medicare drug plan. The Post believes a one-time, 60-day extension of the deadline would be reasonable in view of the continuing confusion surrounding the start-up of this complicated and controversial program.
The president has said he has no intention of extending the deadline and claims 86 percent of seniors now have some source of prescription coverage. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said Wednesday that 37 million Medicare beneficiaries out of a total of 43 million eligible now have coverage.
But other observers aren’t so sure the administration statistics are accurate since they admittedly combine a hard count of seniors who signed up for the coverage with estimates of those who don’t need the new Medicare Part D because they already have such insurance through Veterans Affairs, their workplace health insurance or other sources.
Robert Hayes, president of the New York-based Medicare Rights Center, believes Leavitt’s estimate of 5.8 million people with existing coverage may be too high – which would mean the estimate of those still needing to be signed up would be too low. Tricia Neuman of the Kaiser Family Foundation shares Hayes’ concern that the administration may have under- estimated the number of seniors still needing to sign up. But she also notes that enrollment, after a slow start, is now growing briskly.
Eligible seniors who miss the deadline will face a surcharge of at least 1 percent each month if they sign up later.
Eventually, some deadline and penalty is absolutely necessary for the program to work, because otherwise healthy seniors could delay signing up until they were sick and needed the coverage. Any insurance program works by using the premiums paid by people who don’t need the coverage at any given moment to pay the much larger benefits to the smaller number of people who do need the coverage.
Still, the administration has already extended the deadline for some low-income seniors who qualify for government subsidies. It wouldn’t cripple the new Medicare drug program to allow all seniors another 60 days to navigate what many still see as a formidable bureaucratic maze.
