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It’s time to let Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

If we truly want to lower prescription drug prices for all Americans, the number one solution is allowing Medicare to negotiate directly with Big Pharma. While it’s true that there are several commendable proposals to address the problem — including greater transparency, regulating Pharmacy Benefit Managers, promoting more generic competition, and importing drugs from Canada – Medicare must be empowered to engage in price negotiations with drug-makers. It’s an idea President Trump supported during the 2016 campaign, but has yet to embrace in office.

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Drug prices and out-of-pocket costs paid by seniors have soared, forcing some older Americans to go without needed medications, cut pills and skip doses – or even choose between paying for medicine and groceries. Fortunately, the elected leaders at this town hall are working hard to right this wrong.

Max Richtman via Senator Wyden Headlines National Committee Town Hall on Rx Drug Pricing.

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Trump Breaks Promise to Seniors

Candidate Trump vs. President Trump

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The best-case and worst-case scenarios for Trump’s health care price transparency rule

Trump wants to make health care prices more transparent. How much good will it do?

Dylan Scott

The Trump administration has grand plans to make health care prices more transparent, hoping a little bit of sunlight will help disinfect the high costs of US health care.

In new regulations, the administration is requiring hospitals to disclose for the first time the prices they negotiated with health insurers for a wide range of services, as well as the prices they charge patients who are paying with their own money. The hospitals will also be asked to create a list of 300 so-called “shoppable” services that patients can use, targeted to more elective services where customers might actually shop around.

At the same time, under another related new rule, health insurers will be required to specifically detail how much patients could be asked to pay out of pocket for various medical services. Combined, the regulations are a salvo against the often opaque and labyrinthine world of health care prices.

via Vox.

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Many middle-class seniors are forced to impoverish themselves by exhausting their hard-earned savings simply to qualify for Medicaid. Families, too, make undue financial sacrifices to provide in-home care to seniors — by forgoing paying jobs or leaving the workforce early.

via America’s long-term care crisis is worsening.

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Individual plans for 2020 are cheaper — premiums are lower, on average, and in some areas people who qualify for government subsidies could end up with no monthly payment.  Meanwhile, a pending court case threatens to overturn the entire law, with no clear replacement plan in the works. All these factors have combined to create a cloud of confusion and misunderstanding — some even say misinformation — about the availability of this health coverage.

Here’s what consumers need to know.

The ACA is intact — at least for now.

The Affordable Care Act is still the law of the land.

The GOP-led Congress gutted a key part of the law — the penalty for the individual mandate — that required everyone to have coverage. But other key tenets of the ACA remain in place, including the individual marketplace it created where people can shop for health coverage.

via Kaiser Health News.

Related Reading:

How the Affordable Care Act Helps Seniors.

The ACA provides new ways to help hospitals, doctors and other health care providers coordinate care for beneficiaries so that health care quality is improved and unnecessary spending reduced.

• Lower-Cost Prescription Drugs.
• Preventive Services and Annual Wellness Visit.
• Lower Medicare Part B Premiums.
• Medicare Fraud, Waste and Abuse.

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Stay up to date on information like this by signing up for our free newsletter, Your Morning Read, by clicking here.

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America’s long-term care crisis is worsening.

Long term care is something most of us will need as we grow older…

…Unfortunately, this type of care is extremely expensive, and for many Americans, downright unaffordable. Most seniors simply don’t have the average $100,000 a year for a nursing home, $45,000 for assisted living, or $33,000 for in-home care…

…With millions of seniors and their families struggling to acquire — or provide — much-needed long term care, the time to act is now.

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Who is your ideal candidate?

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Retirement in America is growing less secure, physically and financially, given the omnipresent threat and cost of serious illness or disease.

Why it matters: Qualifying for Medicare does not guarantee that older adults will skirt potentially ruinous medical bills. Millions of seniors have also come to rely on the taxpayer-funded program for lower income people — Medicaid — and there’s no indication that will slow down.

• “I can’t tell you how many times people talk about how unaffordable the costs are, how it wipes away life savings in short order,” said Tricia Neuman, a Medicare policy expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

via Axios.

Related Reading:

It’s time to let Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

If we truly want to lower prescription drug prices for all Americans, the number one solution is allowing Medicare to negotiate directly with Big Pharma. While it’s true that there are several commendable proposals to address the problem — including greater transparency, regulating Pharmacy Benefit Managers, promoting more generic competition, and importing drugs from Canada – Medicare must be empowered to engage in price negotiations with drug-makers. It’s an idea President Trump supported during the 2016 campaign, but has yet to embrace in office.

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The Trump administration on Friday announced it would begin forcing hospitals to publicly disclose the discounted prices they negotiate with insurance companies, a potentially bold move to help people shop for better deals on a range of medical services, from hip replacements to brain scans.

“For decades, hospitals, insurance companies, lobbyists and special interests have hidden prices from consumers, so they could drive up costs for you, and you had no idea what was happening,” President Trump said Friday afternoon in the White House’s Roosevelt Room. “You’d get bills that were unbelievable and you’d have no idea why.”

via New York Times.

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