Elderly and Medicare

Paper Summary:

This paper provides an overview of Medicare, a program of national health insurance setup in 1965 for persons who are over the age of sixty-five or seriously disabled. It looks at how many medical procedures of the 1960s have been replaced by drug therapies and how Medicare has never been updated to include outpatient prescription drug coverage, leaving senior citizens, many of whom live on fixed incomes, especially affected by this lack of coverage. It discusses how. with the baby boomer generation ageing fast, and advancements in medical science, the new challenge is now to ensure that those who were responsible for the above will be cared for in the new century.

From the Paper:

"In 1998, the US spent a total of one hundred billion dollars on prescription drugs. According to a report published in June 2001 by the Washington Business Group Healthcare (WBGH) and the Financial Management Association (HFMA), the cost of prescription drugs shot up by 14.6% in 2000, after an 18% rise in 1999. (Arya, 2001) From 1992 to 1998, the number of prescriptions rose by 40%. The government is caught in a difficult position. On the one hand it needs to curb the spiraling costs, on the other it has to protect the interests of its pharmaceutical industry. Expanding the use of generic drugs would be one way of reducing costs, but this is unlikely to happen because of the billions of dollars spend by pharmaceuticals on research in an intensely competitive field."

More papers on Elderly and Medicare:

• Essay # 26923 : "Social Security and Medicare"
• Research Paper # 59921 : "Seniors and Medicare Reforms"
• Analytical Essay # 132479 : "Differences in Medicaid and Medicare Programs"

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