aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, February 03, 2006

Medicare drug program: the cost benefit ratio

The Newshour looked at the troubled start of the Medicare Prescription Drug program last night. Here, more fun with numbers. How many people are covered at what cost? The quote is from Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a nonprofit organization that advocates for healthcare consumers:

It was interesting during the news clip, Sen. Santorum said and Mark McClellan said during the hearings, that there are 24 million people who are getting drug coverage under this program.

In point of fact, there are only 3.6 million Americans who are now getting drug coverage who didn’t have it before. The other 20 some odd million were getting coverage through Medicaid, there were about 6 million people getting coverage through Medicaid, you had about 7 million people who had coverage through their previous employer, you had about 3 million getting coverage through the Veterans Administration, about 4 million who were getting it through managed care plans.

So in totality, this program has only added a little over three and a half million people, and this is for a program that cost $700 billion over ten years.

I’d quote the response but it made no sense to me so I’ll let the self-correcting blogosphere take care of that.