- WASHINGTON (Reuters Health)
- Beneficiaries in the U.S. Medicare health program are expected to consume
$1.9 trillion worth of prescription drugs over the next decade, the Congressional
Budget Office told a U.S. House committee Wednesday.
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- The good news about that number, CBO Director Douglas
Holtz-Eakin told the House Ways and Means Committee, is that it is only
four percent higher than last year's estimate. But the bad news, he said,
"is that prescription drug spending continues to rise even faster
than Medicare (spending) itself, about nine percent per year."
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- As a result, he said, even without adding prescription
drug coverage to Medicare, spending on drugs will total nearly half of
what Medicare will spend on all other services from 2004 to 2013.
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- Holtz-Eakin's news came as members of two House committees
and witnesses at the two hearings debated Medicare's overall financial
state and how adding a promised drug benefit would affect it.
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- Republicans and several witnesses said that a drug benefit
cannot be added without other changes to hold down Medicare spending overall.
"To take on current Medicare and add on prescription drugs is not
a solution," said Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas, R-Calif.
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- U.S. Comptroller General David Walker agreed.
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- "Congress may want to enact a Medicare Hippocratic
oath -- do not make Medicare's already serious financial imbalance worse,"
said Walker, who testified at the Ways and Means hearing.
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- But Democrats at Ways and Means as well as the Energy
and Commerce Health Subcommittee said Republicans are overstating Medicare's
financial woes in order to justify efforts to privatize the program.
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- "How can a program partially funded out of general
revenues be barreling toward insolvency?" asked Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio,
referring to the fact that three fourths of Medicare's outpatient program
is funded by undedicated tax dollars.
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- "Does the fact that we just increased the tax dollars
devoted to the Department of Defense mean we rescued it from the brink
of insolvency?" he asked.
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- And several witnesses questioned whether President Bush's
plan to increase private health plan participation in Medicare would actually
save the program money.
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- "There is no reason to believe that greater reliance
on private plans will actually reduce expenditures or put the program on
a sounder financial footing," testified former Medicare official Dr.
Robert Berenson before the Energy and Commerce panel.
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- Rather, Berenson said, the President's Medicare proposal
"seems designed more as an ongoing attack on government's role in
health care, in the face of the evidence showing that Medicare has been
a remarkably successful social insurance program."
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- Urban Institute economist Marilyn Moon pointed out that
while Medicare costs are rising, they are rising no faster than private
health care costs.
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- "It's Medicare's problem, but it's not Medicare's
fault that health care costs are rising," she told the Energy and
Commerce panel.
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