insurance company considerable costs previously paid out for prescription drugs. Thus, we can see that the largest beneficiary of this whole prescription-drug benefit for Medicare would be the private insurance and employer-sponsored insurance companies who have been providing prescription-drug coverage to seniors. These companies are mostly major corporations and would save about $50 billion over five years by having Medicare pay for their customer’s prescription drug expenses for them. Basically, the government would be letting employer-sponsored and private Medicare supplemental insurance companies off the hook.A transfer from taxpayers to wealthy senior citizens and to large insurance companies seems very inefficient, inequitable, and undesirable, but this is basically what the presidential candidates are proposing with the addition of a prescription-drug benefit to Medicare.ConclusionIn summary, there are several reasons why the expansion of Medicare to include a prescription-drug benefit would be inefficient and unnecessary. Although it may sound appealing to senior citizens, in reality only a very small portion of them need or even want such a benefit. Generally speaking, most senior citizens already have prescription-drug coverage or else have enough money to pay for their prescription drugs themselves. The presidential candidates should have been addressing the more important issue of how we will pay for Medicare as it exists now. Medicare needs to be reformed to prepare for the inevitability of future bankruptcy and collapse before we should look at adding new benefits....
