2. The Act addresses special concerns of people enrolled in Medicare Part D prescription drug plans.
Currently, Medicare Part D recipients enter an initial coverage period after their deductible is met. During this initial coverage phase, the recipient’s prescription drug plan pays its share for each covered drug until the combined amount, including the deductible, reaches $2,930.
Once the recipient and his or her Medicare prescription drug plan have reached the combined $2,930 threshold, the Medicare Part D recipient is said to be in the “Donut Hole.”
During this phase the recipient normally has to pay prescription drug costs out of pocket until total out-of-pocket costs reach $4,700.
According to NPR, the law, over several years, is set to reduce the amount of money that Medicare drug plans can charge individuals for drugs when their coverage lapses in the donut hole. Specifically, the Affordable Care Act provides seniors a 50% discount on covered brand name Medicare-approved medications and a 14% discount on covered generic drugs, and, according to NPR, the price reductions that have already taken effect have saved Medicare consumers billions of dollars in drug costs.
Although the DNC covered little if any new ground on the issue of health care, at least one speaker at the convention made an impact on some by speaking about what the Affordable Health Care Act meant to her family. Stacey Linh, a paralegal in Phoenix, Ariz., told listeners about her daughter’s congenital heart defects and said that, if not for “Obamacare,” which restricts health insurance companies from denying coverage after financial thresholds have been reached, her daughter would already have reached lifetime medical coverage caps from insurance providers and would be virtually uninsurable.
While the DNC featured a speaker outside politics to drive home its current health care policy, the most memorable speaker on health care at the Republican National Convention, held in Tampa, Fla., in late August, was likely Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan.
Perhaps you saw Ryan’s address to the RNC. In it he voiced his disapproval over “Obamacare,” characterizing the President’s approach to health care as “a long, divisive, all-or-nothing attempt to put the federal government in charge of health care.” Ryan went on to say, “Obamacare comes to more than 2,000 pages of rules, mandates, taxes, fees, and fines that have no place in a free country.”