Overcharged for Medicare's prescription drug program? You're out of luck. [View All]

Overcharged for Medicare's prescription drug program? You're out of luck.

By David Goldstein | McClatchy Newspapers


WASHINGTON — If you've been overcharged by Medicare's prescription drug program, don't count on getting your money back any time soon, if at all.

And don't count on Medicare to help you, either.

The government-run elderly health care program appears to have washed its hands of any responsibility for mistakes that have cost subscribers and taxpayers several billion dollars.

That was the message contained in Medicare's response this week to a series of questions about problems with the prescription drug program posed earlier this year by Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri.

"I was shocked at this answer because it basically said, 'Tough. We're not worried about them (seniors),' " McCaskill said at a Senate hearing Wednesday.

McCaskill wrote Medicare in January after the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services reported that 80 percent of the insurance companies participating in the elderly drug program, known as Medicare Part D, owed Medicare about $4.4 billion for 2006 alone.

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