January 19, 2006: NORTON SAYS WITNESSES CALLED BY DEMOCRATS WILL EXPOSE WIDESPREAD MEDICARE...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 19, 2006

NORTON SAYS WITNESSES CALLED BY DEMOCRATS WILL EXPOSE WIDESPREAD MEDICARE PRESCRIPTION DRUG CRISIS

Washington, DC—Robert Maruca, D.C. Department of Health Medicare Director, will be a featured witness at a Democratic Briefing, “Implementation of the New Medicare Drug Benefit,” the Democratic Minority’s version of a “hearing” on problems with the new Medicare Drug Benefit rolling out throughout the United States. Although the minority party cannot call formal hearings, the briefing by the House Government Reform Committee Democrats, chaired by Ranking Member Henry Waxman, otherwise resembles a hearing featuring Medicare beneficiaries, experts, and states and localities whose problems are typical of those reportedly being faced across the country. The District will be the only big city to testify.

Norton said, “This city has a story to tell that is emblematic of the problems faced by every big city in the United States . The bulk of the Medicare prescription drug crisis we are seeing is falling on the most vulnerable beneficiaries – the poorest of the elderly and disabled Americans, the “dual eligibles,” whose drugs were previously paid through Medicaid and who reside primarily in big cities and rural areas. They were told not to worry, you will be automatically enrolled. Instead the beneficiaries most often with the least resources and education are having to straighten out a mess in access to often life and death prescriptions created by the federal government.” Norton said that the Department of Health and Human Services is “shifting the burden of registering these beneficiaries to pharmacists, many of them small business people,” with no guarantee of payment to them or to states and localities like the District that have advanced funds to pay for medicines because of this emergency. Norton said tomorrow’s briefing “will expose quite astonishing facts and conditions that are not known.”