Posted At TPMCafe.com
BY : Kate Steadman
AARP announced Friday a total reversal from its previous partnership with the GOP on the Medicare Part D benefit. Where the group once supported the pharmaceutical companies' inalienable rights to demand their highest prices, AARP is now calling for the government to negotiate.
In 2003, AARP was so confident in the new program that they went so far as to sponsor their own Medicare Part D Plan. What's more, AARP's own study revealed on January 4th (only 27 days ago) that prices in the new prescription drug benefit were lower than buying drugs from Canada. That declaration essentially obliterated efforts to legalize reimportation, paving the way for the realization of pharma's ultimate goals: ensure top prices for its products and kill efforts to reimport its products from abroad.
After spending the last five years in partnership with the GOP, AARP is wising up. The organization expected its complacency with Medicare Part D to pay off, ensuring open GOP ears to whisper AARP's legislative priorities in. But after Bush's bungled Social Security privatization attempt, AARP realized not only did their assistance in 2003 mean nothing, now they were chained to a boat that was sinking fast.
So in their last legislative agenda planning meeting, AARP leaders decided to do an about face: renew calls to reimport drugs from Canada and push for the government's right to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies.
While Democrats may feel heartened to have AARP back home, they should be wary -- as Barbara Dreyfuss exposed in this American Prospect article, AARP was nothing more than an ally of convenience:
Of course, AARP was never considered militant. It was founded as an insurance business in 1958, and the organization...opposed the creation of Medicare...It never developed an activist orientation, and for many years its focus was on selling insurance...But its leadership in Washington, and around the country, consisted mostly of Democrats committed to maintaining Medicare as a strong government-run program. AARP helped pass a major expansion of Medicare in 1988. With Democrats controlling the House for 40 years, AARP's lobbying efforts in defense of Medicare were never really tested because the only argument that ever took place among Democrats revolved around how much to expand the government-run program.
So as AARP flip-flops back to senior's best interest, Democratic suspicion is well-founded. While AARP's reversal adds weight to calls to fix Medicare Part D, their continued push to reimport drugs from Canada is obstructionist for the program's long-term viability. If seniors believe they can continue buying their drugs from abroad, they won't sign up for the new benefit. As Leif and I noted, Medicare Part D will crash and burn if it fails to meet enrollment goals.Its great that the AARP begin to move towards reforming this law by supporting price negotiation. Did anyone see the recent poll by Ipos-AP? It found that over 59% of respondents reported no significant cost savings from the program. That is an astonishing failure for a program that is costing over $700 billion over ten years (numbers that will probably be revised upwards yet again before I even finish writing this). But the AARP really needs to push not only for price negotiation, but also for a standard Medicare run benefit. There is a report done by Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (http://www.cepr.net/publications/efficient_medicare_2006_01.pdf) that shows how much a medicare run program with negotiation can save and its truely astonishing. I hope any AARP members reading this can help pressure the AARP to support the democratic alternative (HR 752) to have both price negotiation and a Medicare run program.
