Part D off to better start this year, but some problems remain

More than a quarter million Medicare beneficiaries will have extra time to change drug plans due to insurer errors.

By David Glendinning, AMNews staff. Jan. 22, 2007.

Washington -- A new plan year for the Medicare drug benefit started Jan. 1, and government officials said that things are going much more smoothly than they were at this time last year. But Medicare Part D has not completely gotten over its enrollment problems.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services reported that more than 39 million program enrollees, or about 90%, are getting drug coverage through Part D or from another source that is just as good. More than 300,000 people joined a drug plan for the first time in the final six weeks of last year. Pharmacies are filling more than 3 million prescriptions per day, and the level of complaints from beneficiaries is relatively low, the agency said.

This stands in contrast to the early weeks and months of 2006, when Medicare first began paying for outpatient prescription drugs. CMS was besieged with complaints from tens of thousands of patients and their physicians who could not get their first prescriptions filled due to widespread technical glitches and bureaucratic barriers. Federal officials at the time characterized the events as the "growing pains" of a major new entitlement and predicted that enrollment issues would be much less prevalent going forward.

But some Medicare seniors and people with disabilities continue to experience problems. More than 250,000 people who were signed up for plans in 2006, for instance, did not receive required information last fall from their insurers describing their 2007 benefits. This information is especially important for people who might have wanted to switch plans for the new year to receive a different benefits package. They can make that change only during the open enrollment period, which ran from Nov. 15 through Dec. 31.