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Congress and the White House have set their sights on plugging the \u0093doughnut hole,\u0094 the gap in Medicare drug coverage that can leave seniors liable for thousands of dollars a year in prescription costs. Bridging the gap might be easier if there were more data on how big the hole was and its closing costs down the road.<\/p>\n
The Congressional Budget Office, the usual scorekeeper for tracking federal spending, hasn\u0092t predicted how much it would cost to close the doughnut hole, a Washington Post article<\/a> notes this morning. The paper says the only estimate of the cost of filling the gap comes from the Medicare program’s chief actuary, who put the figure at $31 billion over the next decade. There aren\u0092t any budget forecasts going far enough into the future to predict what expanded drug benefit would cost the government once the gap is fully closed, the Post adds.<\/p>\n The House overhaul bill passed in November would gradually eliminate the doughnut hole over 10 years starting with adding $500 to cover drug costs covered by Medicare in 2010. The health overhaul passed by the Senate on Christmas Eve is missing that language, but Senate Leader Harry Reid said this month<\/a> he wanted to adopt the House goal of closing the coverage gap in the final version of the legislation that Congress sends to President Obama for signing. <\/p>\n Drug makers said earlier this year<\/a> they would offer a 50% discount on brand name drugs purchased by seniors in the doughnut hole. That\u0092s part of the drug industry\u0092s deal with Democrats to contribute $80 million over 10 years to the cost of the health overhaul. Here’s more<\/a> on that.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, CBO did do a study in August on how plugging the doughnut hole would reduce what seniors’ total spending on prescription drugs but their Medicare premiums would increase. That study is detailed here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Photo by Salim Virji<\/a> via Flickr<\/em><\/p>\n Congress and the White House have set their sights on plugging the \u0093doughnut hole,\u0094 the gap in Medicare drug coverage that can leave seniors liable for thousands of dollars a year in prescription costs. Bridging the gap might be easier if there were more data on how big the hole was and its closing costs […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":792,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/792"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108015\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/img><\/a>
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