By Lee Graczyk
MnSF executive director

Voters have put their finishing brushstrokes on the new red and blue hues of the national canvas. The election clearly changed who controls majorities in both the U.S. Senate and the House.

The 109th Congress still has the opportunity to pass needed Medicare reform. The scheduled cut in Medicare payments to physicians must be addressed; failure to do so will result in reducing senior's access to health care; as physicians stop seeing Medicare patients or stop taking on new Medicare patients. A cut of 5.1 percent is scheduled to take place in January 2007 - the first of six such cuts in physician payments scheduled over as many years. The lame-duck session can stop these cuts before they are scheduled to go into effect. We need to call, e-mail and visit our congressional representatives demanding action now. Should the lame-duck session fail to take action, any solution offered in the new congress will be made more difficult by the need for a retroactive remedy. The Minnesota Senior Federation suggests a revenue-neutral use of the Medicare stabilization fund to shore up physician payments.

As Medicare recipients enter into the open-enrollment period for Medicare Part D, they are faced with an overdose of choices. Minnesota's seniors will confront the daunting task of choosing between more than 100 possible plans providing a like number of varieties of premiums, formularies and benefits. Congress must standardize these variations in order to simplify the process of selection for seniors. Presently a true product comparison requires computer literacy and more time and expertise than is reasonable to expect.

Congress needs to remove the prohibitions preventing Medicare from negotiating prescription drug prices for Medicare's 43 million recipients. In virtually any other business, volume buyers get volume price discounts. The government already has a model in the Veterans Administration.

Since 1995, when the Senior Federation conducted the nation's first Canadian bus trip to import prescription drugs, MnSF has implored Congress to end the ambiguities surrounding imported drugs. This is even more important now because Medicare recipients must be allowed to count such expenditures against the doughnut hole.

Only passage of time will tell if these challenges and opportunities are met by the 109th Congress or deferred to the 110th. National politicians of all persuasions are calling for bipartisanship, which is laudable. The public is interested in solutions not divisiveness and we do not usually suggest political one-upmanship but we would not mind if the 109th Congress one-upped the 110th Congress and reformed Medicare!