Political Quotes

“today marks the 2-month anniversary of the Medicare prescription drug benefit, and it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that, so far, the Part D, D stands for disaster. The benefit is so complicated and convoluted that even beneficiaries with Ph.D.s have said they could not figure it out. Why is this program so flawed? Because it was designed, or we like to say in the private sector, the first operation is take care of the customer first. I have yet to find a single pharmaceutical executive or an HMO executive who is complaining about this program, but I have found a heck of a lot of senior citizens who are complaining about this program. This program was never designed with our senior citizens in mind. If it was, you would not have the complexities that are happening for our senior citizens. The executives of the drug companies will earn $139 billion of additional profits that they would not have earned any other way; insurance companies, $130 billion of additional profits over the next 10 years. The complexity of the benefit shows, in my view, what was wrong and what we should have done right. Three simple steps: One, with the May 15 penalty that will kick in, the tax, the senior Medicare tax, postpone that until HHS and CMS figure out what they should be doing, rather than what they should not be doing. No senior should be forced into a program where even the people running it do not know what they are doing.…”