MEDICARE PRESCRIPTION BILL: MAMA FALLS THROUGH THE CRACKS
I was talking on the phone last night to my fabulous almost-85-year-old mother (a Republican) and she told me that she's "fallen through the cracks" of the Medicare prescription bill. She's lucky, though, since she's the widow of a career Air Force officer and still receives those benefits, so her out-of-pocket prescription costs are just shy of $100 per month. She talked about how many of her friends are being forced to pay $200-400 per month for their medicine, but because she enjoys relatively good health for a woman her age (she's had pernicious anemia for almost 40 years, but otherwise she's a dynamo) her meds aren't too expensive. Her friends, also, are fortunate in that they are fairly well-to-do widows who can easily afford their own medicine.
But how do you think a poor widow surviving on a Social Security stipend of around $800-900 per month can afford to spend that kind of money for necessary medicine (and that's apart from their doctor visits)?
Tags: Medicare prescription bil
posted by Motherlode at 11:47 AM
2 Comments:
The only experience I have with this thing was with my grandmother who suffers minor strokes and a pretty severe loss of reality.
My mother and father sat down awhile back to try to figure it out for her.
My father ran a business with just shy of 1,000 employees, graduated law school at third in his class. My mother is a PhD in Childhhod psychology. They sat down in front of that website for two hours before finally giving up.
Fortunately, a couple days later they were able to get with the people at her retirement home and get through it all, but this is two highly educated and capable folks.
All I kept think ing was, what about all those poor souls who aren't in a nice retirement home or don't have the assistance.
Mike
Wow. What a story. That's the thing our "leaders" can't seem to get -- that there's a vast pool of Americans that are going to be eating dog food again because they don't have the means or the assistance to figure this thing out. And yet it's going to cost us hundreds of billions. Who's going to benefit? Drug and insurance companies.
Maybe they DO get it -- and that's what they meant to achieve all along.
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