Take advantage of Medicare open enrollment

Almost 3 million Florida seniors have an important choice to make in the coming week — and it’s not about what they should get their grandchildren for Christmas.

Rather, it’s about which Medicare plan to enroll in. Until December 7, Sunshine State seniors can select from among 20 different plans, which provide prescription drug coverage for as little as $17 per month. These plans are offered through Medicare Part D, the federal program that ensures older Americans and people with disabilities can afford their medications.

Even though Part D’s existing structure works well, some in Washington want to meddle with it. While a few adjustments may be in order, there’s no reason to fix what isn’t broken — especially since most proposed alterations could remove essential drugs from seniors’ medicine cabinets.

Medicare Part D is popular. Nine out of 10 beneficiaries reported satisfaction with their prescription coverage in a recent survey. Over 40 million people use the program nationwide — more than the entire population of California. One in five Florida residents is enrolled.

The program doesn’t force a one-size-fits-all plan onto these seniors. They can pick the one that best fits their budgets and offers the prescriptions they need.

As a result of this customization, seniors stay healthier for longer. For instance, Part D beneficiaries with congestive heart failure are more likely to stick to their medication — saving the overall Medicare program $2.3 billion a year. The program also is linked to an eight percent decline in hospital visits.

Part D even is credited with a boost in life expectancy. Since 2006, over 200,000 enrollees lived at least one year longer than expected.

Incredibly, this popular, lifesaving program is affordable not just for seniors, but taxpayers, too. The program cost 45 percent less than expected in its first decade.

This affordability is largely thanks to the program’s partially privatized structure. Currently, the insurance companies that provide Part D plans haggle with drug manufacturers for discounts, which are passed on to beneficiaries in the form of lower premiums and co-pays. These rebates have increased each year since Medicare Part D went into effect in 2006. Currently, insurers negotiate an average discount of about 35 percent off a medicine’s list price, according to a new study from the QuintilesIMS Institute.

Some in Congress think the government could secure lower drug prices by having federal bureaucrats, rather than insurance companies, negotiate with drug makers. That’s highly unlikely.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says government negotiators wouldn’t be able to secure lower prices than private negotiators. The only way that the government could achieve any savings is by refusing to pay for certain medications. Those drugs wouldn’t be available to beneficiaries across all 20 of Florida’s Part D plans.

Seniors who have served in the armed forces suffer from such government-manufactured shortages on a daily basis. If a drug’s price tag doesn’t pass muster with a faceless bureaucrat in Washington, it gets left off the Veterans Administration’s list of covered drugs. Consequently, the VA covers only about 80 percent of the most popular prescriptions. By comparison, the most common Medicare Part D plans cover 95 percent of those drugs.

With limited access to medicines, seniors would get sicker. That would raise healthcare costs in the long-term.

Not content with disturbing seniors’ access to affordable Medicare drugs, some in Washington want to ban patent settlements, which would further limit Floridians’ choice of medicines.

Patent settlements allow drug companies to settle intellectual property infringement cases out of court. In many instances, these decisions bring a generic version of a drug to the market before a brand’s patent has expired. That’s great for consumers — since generic medicines drive prices down. Forbidding patent settlements would keep these generics from quickly entering the market.

Medicare Part D and patent settlements get vital drugs to people who need them. And they keep costs low by bolstering competition. During the annual open enrollment period seniors have the chance to pick a Medicare plan that provides affordable prescription coverage. It’s up to their representatives in Washington to protect that opportunity in the years ahead.