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Medicare Drug Card Enrollment Nears 4 Million

July 6, 2004
The Bush administration is nearly halfway toward its goal of enrolling 7.4 million people in the Medicare prescription drug discount card program. CMS Administrator Mark McClellan says that so far, nearly 3.7 million people have enrolled in the program, which Bush administration officials say has helped reduce prescription drug costs by 10% to 25% for beneficiaries since April.

It's estimated that about 66% were enrolled automatically -- either through a managed care plan or a state prescription drug assistance plan. Health care analysts say as many as 700,000 low-income beneficiaries could be enrolled in the program if the federal government expanded automatic enrollment.

The Bush Administration has been resisting calls to expand automatic enrollment, saying it does not want to limit individuals' choice of cards. Legislation introduced in the House and the Senate that would require automatic enrollment of low-income Medicare beneficiaries has gone nowhere.

To date the White House has limited its efforts to enroll low-income beneficiaries by providing about $5 million to the Access to Benefits Coalition, a group of civic organizations dedicated to persuading low-income Medicare beneficiaries to enroll on their own.

McClellan said he expects enrollment to picked up in the next few weeks, the Detroit News reported. He said that 25,000 people are signing up each day (San Francisco Chronicle, 7/6).

Meanwhile, a number of industry analysts are predicting that as the cost of the new Medicare law increases in the next decade, insurers will pressure the federal government to institute price controls on prescription drugs, something the current law prohibits.

July 9 2008

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