Aetna Medicare Summit 2019 - guest speaker

(Left to Right) Don Dempsey, Director of Government Affairs at CVS, Douglas Lubenow, President at Senior Advisors

Each summer, Aetna hosts a Summit Meeting with their largest distribution partners in the country to review some of their potential plan changes for the following year.

This year's event took place last week in Chicago, and we are excited that Doug Lubenow, was asked to present at this year's Summit.  The audience included 500+ distribution partners from around the country.  Doug presented with the Director of Government Affairs of CVS, Don Dempsey.  Doug and Don discussed some legislative updates that are currently being worked on to improve the Medicare system.   Some of the key bills discussed were:

• ​HR-2564 - Medicare Enrollment Protection Act.  This bill is basically trying to fix the Medicare COBRA Trap which penalizes people over the age of 65 who enroll in a COBRA for 18 months (and do not enroll in Medicare Part B).  This bill would fix this problem so these individuals would be able to enroll in Medicare Part B with no penalties/delays after their 18 months of COBRA ends.
• ​HR-1788 - Changes to Part B Late Enrollment Penalties.  People that miss their Part B Enrollment window (and don't have other credible Group Coverage), are eventually hit with a Part B Late Enrollment Penalty which lasts for the rest of the individual's life.  This bill would change these Late Enrollment Penalties to reduce the number of situations in which the Penalties apply and also change the duration of the penalty from lifetime to a shorter time period.
• Bill TBD - Putting a Cap on the Out-of-Pocket Exposure for Part D of Medicare.  Currently, there is no cap on the Out-of-Pocket spending limit for Part D of Medicare.  This basically means if you have very expensive medications, you will continue to pay a copay/coinsurance for your medications for the entire year regardless of how much you have spent.  There is something called Catastrophic Coverage with Part D in which the member only has to pay 5% of their drugs after they reach a True-out-of-pocket limit (e.g. $5,100 in 2019), however 5% of very expensive medications could still be thousands of additional dollars per year in drug expenses.  This bill would change Part D of Medicare to include a CAP on the Out-of-Pocket limit that an individual could pay for medications in a given year.

Doug presented the impacts of each of these items as well as the reasons that we are supportive of these changes to help improve the Medicare System.