The Senate Finance Committee has scheduled a hearing for May 8 on the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. Beatrice Disman, the New York Regional Commissioner for Social Security, who is the chair of Social Security's Medicare Planning and Implementation Task Force, is scheduled to testify.
2 comments:
personally i think this is the most inefficiant of all the programs run at the federal level. The Perscrpition drug providers manage thier programs send the info to medicare who then updates the shared medicare file quartly. so you have people who have cancelled months ago still having deductions from thier social security. The PDP's tell them to call Social Security we tell them to call thier PDP and Medicare. so in the end its just a circle of no results until the control file finally gets updated. we either need more control over the PDP's or have everyone pay directly to thier provider bypassing all the Medicare Part D problems.
I am a service rep in a field office, and I genuinely feel sorry for people with Part D problems who are being red-taped to death. It is exactly as the other "anonymous" posted - the PDP tells them to call SSA, and we at SSA tell them to call Medicare or their PDP. There are also a lot of inexperienced SSA employees (heck, we are all inexperienced with Part D) that are incorrectly sending MDWs to FOs and the PSCs for premium problems while telling the beneficiary that it will be fixed. These referrals are adding to backlogs and generate bad PR since SSA can't do anything. They should have just made Part D a standard benefit like Part B with people having the option of purchasing a supplement, or completely take SSA out of the equation.
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