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Christy Hicks, 212-452-7723

Century Foundation Fellow provides analysis of prescription drug benefit as seniors pass the enrollment deadline.

May 22, 2006, New York—Last week’s enrollment deadline for Medicare Part D marks the end of what has been a tumultuous first stage in the new prescription drug plan. While seniors have signed up in much greater numbers in recent weeks, the future of this complex and unwieldy benefit remains unclear.

News stories about last week’s deadline highlighted the penalties for late enrollment; however, bigger challenges lie ahead for the new program. Leif Wellington Haase, health care fellow at The Century Foundation, explains these challenges in “When Good Things Happen to Bad Policies: Taking Stock of the Medicare Drug Benefit.” “From its inception, the design of the drug benefit has been flawed,” Haase explains. “It remains needlessly complicated, cumbersome for beneficiaries to sign up for, unnecessarily expensive, and unlikely to promote cost-effective spending on prescription drugs. However, because the level of enrollment has been reasonably high and concentrated in a few large plans sponsored by national insurers, legislators are likely to tune up the program rather than trade it in. As the benefit evolves, it is likely to reopen an older and long-running debate about the privatization of Medicare.”

Leif Wellington Haase is the co-author of Medicare Tomorrow (2001), The Basics: Medicare Reform(rev. ed.), and A New Deal for Health: How to Cover Everyone and Get Medical Costs under Control (2005). His opinion pieces and commentaries have appeared in CNBC, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, the Associated Press, and UPI.

“When Good Things Happen to Bad Policies” evaluates the initial implementation of the Medicare prescription drug benefit at the close of the first enrollment period and considers the viability of the program in both the short and long term. The brief is available online at http://www.tcf.org/list.asp?type=PB&pubid=561.

Haase offers further analysis of Medicare Part D in “The Medicare Drug Benefit: Straight Answers to the Toughest Questions,” a guide to key policy questions about how the prescription drug benefit will work. This guide, along with the issue brief “ Launching the Medicare Drug Benefit: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” is available at The Century Foundation Web site at http://www.tcf.org and at http://www.healthpolicywatch.org. For more information or media copies of these reports, or to schedule an interview with Leif Wellington Haase, contact Cate Brandon at brandon@tcf.org or (212) 452-7726.