San Francisco Chronicle Opinion Pieces Discuss Issues Related To Medicare

The San Francisco Chronicle on Wednesday published two opinion pieces that discuss issues related to Medicare. Summaries appear below.

• Spyros Andreopoulos: The Medicare prescription drug benefit "has fulfilled its goal of providing drug coverage to Medicare beneficiaries" but "has failed to protect low-income Americans from high out-of-pockets costs for their medications," Andreopoulos, director emeritus of the Office of Communication and Public Affairs at Stanford University Medical Center, writes in a Chronicle opinion piece. In addition, he writes, "program costs that critics had feared would exceed government projections by as much as $750 billion by the end of the decade have materialized sooner than expected." According to Andreopoulos, the "soaring" costs of the program could "harm Medicare's core mission and the elderly." He writes, "Because a tax increase is out of the question, one obvious solution is to amend" the 2003 Medicare law and "limit the drug benefit." Andreopoulos concludes, "Limiting an entitlement may prove politically impossible, but it would be better to admit that the new law was a mistake and fix it than to cut benefits piecemeal," a move that would "leave the program's future and its recipients in perpetual limbo" (Andreopoulos, San Francisco Chronicle, 2/27).
  
  
• Donna Arduin: "Clearly, the Medicare recovery audit program is working," but a bill supported by the "hospital lobby" would suspend the expansion of the program to protect those who "have built their business models around their annual Medicare windfall," Arduin, president of Arduin, Laffer & Moore: Econometrics, writes in a Chronicle opinion piece. She adds, "Medicare ... drowns in waste and abuse," and, although audits recovered more than $350 million in overpayments in three states in 2007, some lawmakers support the legislation, which would "throw a life preserver to the health care organizations that improperly bill the program for billions of dollars each year." According to Arduin, the bill would suspend the nationwide expansion of the pilot program scheduled for next month until a "laundry list of 'concerns' and 'issues' can be evaluated in depth," although "virtually every concern raised by hospitals has already been addressed by Medicare." The "government calls recovery audits a credible deterrent to improper billing," she writes, adding, "It's no wonder that hospitals and other health care providers ... want the program stopped." Arduin concludes, "Recovery auditing is the life preserver that Medicare needs now" (Arduin, San Francisco Chronicle, 2/27).