Ben Nelson Protects Medicare Advantage (And Big Pharma)

Prime Blue Dog Ben Nelson, who hasn't made many non-Republican friends lately - or ever - has just sold the New York Times a Bridge to Nowhere, convincing one Robert Pear that, really, Medicare Advantage isn't a huge giveaway to Big Pharma that costs seniors A LOT of $$$ they wouldn't otherwise have to pay for their drug treatments, it's..well, let him tell it in his own inimitable way.

The bill taken up this week by the committee would cut Medicare payments to insurance

companies that care for more than 10 million older Americans, including nearly one million in Florida. The program, known as Medicare Advantage, is popular because it offers extra benefits, including vision and dental care and even, in some cases, membership in health clubs or fitness centers.

Yuh. At 3X normal rates. And of course health clubs and fitness centers are very well known for the massive numbers of senior citizens who go there to work on their abs and get shinier, more healthy quads, running on treadmills and bench-pressing free weights. And since when is there no vision or dental care with Medicare? When did that happen? Or does "extra" mean they pay for rhinestones on the hornrims?

Medicare Advantage is a Bush Era BP rip-off that should have been killed years ago, but here's a Democrat who wants to save it even from being cut (thus saving millions in govt-paid BP profits) and he's found a few clueless seniors to help him do it. To  counter the Know-Nothings, you might want to read this from a senior who bothered to fuind out what was really going on.

Under the 2003 law, prices and "formularies"—the lists of which drugs are covered according to different "tiers" of coverage—are set by the individual companies that offer Part D plans. Each company makes its own deals with drug manufacturers for discounts in the form of rebates (to the companies, not the consumers). There's little real competition among these insurers, and to the extent they are able to squeeze discounts out of the manufacturers, they go straight to their bottom line—not to consumers. In an investigation last October, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform found that the discounts negotiated by private plans reduced overall drug spending by only 8 percent in 2007; in contrast, the Medicaid program, where the government buys drugs directly, cuts costs a full 26 percent via rebates.

In fact, one of the Medicare Modernization Act's biggest handouts to the drug industry was its reclassification of 6.2 million low-income elderly and disabled people who had been receiving drug coverage through the Medicaid program. The new law forced these people into Part D; now the government subsidizes the same drugs at higher prices. According to the 2007 House report, that change alone stood to increase drug company profits by an estimated $2.8 billion in 2007.

(emphasis added)

This thing is a dawg and the fact that Mr Pear couldn't do even the slightest actual research, couldn't in fact bring himself to do anything whatever except play stenographer for Ben Nelson's corporate puppetry act, conceived, written, directed and produced by Ben's biggest contributors' lobbyists and PR flacks, is all you need to know about just how far the Gray Lady has fallen into The Pit Of Ordure that is corporate media in an oligarchy.

Which is what we're living in if you haven't figured it out already.

Ben Nelson's limited search notwithstanding, there are elderly people in Florida who aren't stoopid. They need to call him on this BS before the rest of a not-too-bright state swallows it whole.