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Markowitz Hosts Medicare Prescription Drug Forum

Photographs by Kathryn Kirk

In photo (foreground, from left, ): are Borough President Marty Markowitz, Deputy Borough President Yvonne Graham, and Sylvia Deutsch of the Jewish Community Relations Council. Behind them, from left, are Dayle Berke of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Betty Duggan of the Medicare Rights Center, Fatima Shama of the Greater Southern Brooklyn Health Coalition, Assistant Commissioner Sonia Rodriguez of the City Department for the Aging, and Deborah Konopko of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Borough President Marty Markowitz and Rabbi Bob Kaplan of the Jewish Community Relations Council sponsored an educational forum and leadership training Friday to ensure that Brooklyn seniors receive the help and information they need to take advantage of the new Medicare Part D prescription-drug benefit. The complicated program rules and enrollment procedures have caused widespread confusion and frustration among seniors.

The standing-room-only crowd was vivid proof of the need for assistance in sorting out the details of the plan. The borough president had laryngitis, causing Deputy Borough President Yvonne Graham to read his remarks for him.
“I believe that guaranteeing quality health care affordable to every resident is one of government’s core duties,” the borough president’s remarks said. “The new Medicare prescription drug benefit does not exactly represent government’s finest hour. The new system is complicated, confusing, and is causing anxiety among seniors across the nation. A process that should have been simplified has instead become a burden for Medicare recipients, many of whom rely on their medications to survive and maintain their quality of life.

“As someone who turned 60 last year and is now officially a senior, I understand the complex feelings seniors and Medicare providers are experiencing. When you have worked hard your entire life with the expectation that Medicare would be there to help in your mature years, it is frustrating to have to re-learn how to navigate a public health system that seems to go out of its way to be as user-unfriendly as possible. It’s enough to make any Brooklynite say ‘Oy vey!’

“I just hope that when we say good bye Bush, and elect a Democratic Congress, that our nation will have a health care system that works for all Americans. That day can’t come soon enough!
“At today’s forum, we hope to put some of the ‘care’ back into Medicare, by taking the anxiety out of the new drug benefit, and giving you the information you need to find the plan that’s right for you, or for those you serve,” he concluded.

Responding to declarations of public-health emergencies in several states last week and announcements by other states that they would step in to pay for prescriptions that should have been covered by the new benefit, President Bush had to order insurers to provide a 30-day supply of any drug that a beneficiary was previously taking, and said that poor people must not be charged more than $5 for a covered drug.