Senior Have Hard Time Telling If Drug Is Covered Under Medicare

A new study has revealed that the new Medicare Part D plan is making it exceedingly hard for beneficiaries to know exactly what medications are covered under the plan. This is due to the more than 1,800 different private health plans now participating in part D, and each having its own drug coverage charts.

Lead researcher Dr. Chien-Wen Tseng, a generalist physician faculty scholar at the University Of Hawaii School Of Medicine said, "Technically, it is possible for physicians to look up every drug for every patient, but in practicality, this study says they aren't doing it because it's just too hard."

According to Tseng, is that "12 percent of patients said that they had left the pharmacy empty-handed, because the drug was either too expensive or was not covered."

The idea of the new Part D was to expand drug coverage to include more medications and render more helpful coverage, but if its beneficiaries aren't able to figure out which drugs are covered under the plan, its just as ineffective as the original plan.

According to HealthDay,

Tseng and the study's senior author, Dr. R. Adams Dudley, of the University of California, San Francisco, used data from Medicare's Web site to track the availability of 75 widely used medications for older patients in California and Hawaii. The drugs were drawn from eight classes, including ACE inhibitors, beta-blockers, calcium channel blockers, diuretics, SSRI antidepressants and statins.

The good news was that, in the vast majority of cases, patients could expect to find at least one drug from each of the eight classes that would be covered by their plan, with the exception of heart drugs called angiotensin II receptor blockers.

The real problem came in figuring out -- in the short amount of time allowed by most doctor's office visits -- whether a particular drug was or was not covered by a patient's participating health plan.

The solution to the problem is to streamline information so that knowledge of which drugs are covered is more accessible.

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