New Medicare program full of snags

New Medicare program full of snags

Due to loopholes in the Government's new Medicare prescription-drug benefit program, senior citizens are facing a lot of problems. On one hand several seniors could not get drugs from pharmacists and on the other hand there were delays in the formalities.

With the advent of the new program many seniors have had to go without medicine or pay out from their own pockets.

The New Medicare program was launched on the 1st of January 2006. But one fault after another has been cropping up since its commencement. Due to system malfunction, many pharmacists failed to verify whether the seniors approaching them were covered under Medicare; hundreds of seniors had to return empty-handed.

The worst affected by the verification glitch were the poor people who were covered under the Medicaid program and were by default covered under Medicare too. But things seem to be gradually returning to normalcy. “On Monday and Tuesday we were having difficulty getting enrollment eligibility information from the government database. But by yesterday [Tuesday] afternoon, our information requests were going through and we were getting the information back that we needed. For those patients, the situation has gotten a lot better,” said Michael Polzin, spokesman for Walgreen Co the largest pharmacy chain in the US.

The government held private contractor NDCHealth Corp. responsible for the verification goof-up. But Robert Borchert, spokesman for NDCHealth defended his company saying, “It was the start of the new program, the high volumes of queries and it was the robustness of the data and the data field that were being queried. As of [Tuesday] morning, we are back to normal response time in our system. For most of the day, queries were handled in less than a second.”

Some seniors have also encountered problems in getting paperwork done by the insurance companies and many others have been baffled by the ambiguities in the new program.