A vast majority of seniors enrolled in Medicare’s prescription drug program will see double-digit rate hikes in 2011, according to an independent analysis released Thursday.

Avalere Health, a Washington-based policy group, estimates the average monthly premium for Part D’s top 10 plans — which cover roughly 70 percent of all Part D enrollees — will jump 10 percent in 2011.

“Some major plans are no longer being offered and premiums for certain plans have increased significantly,” Avalere CEO Dan Mendelson said in a statement. “Beneficiaries are going to need to be savvy consumers and shop around to find the plan that’s best for them.”

Of the top 10 drug plans catering to Medicare patients, seven are projected to increase their premiums next year between 43 and 3 percent, Avalere estimates. The remaining three plans — including the top plan by enrollment, AARP’s MedicareRx Preferred — Avalere says will decrease rates, between 11 and 2 percent.

Two of the top 10 stand-alone drug plans — AARP’s MedicareRx Saver and Universal American’s PrescribaRX Bronze — are not being offered next year at all, shifting those patients (automatically) into different plans offered by the same sponsors, Avalere notes.  Those plans were the 2nd and 9th most popular, respectively, among seniors this year, the group says.

http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/medicare/120635-report-drug-costs-for-seniors-to-skyrocket-next-year

Mary Thompson with her daughter Emily, 11, who had not been covered by her parents’ insurance because of pre-existing conditions.

Sometimes lost in the partisan clamor about the new health care law is the profound relief it is expected to bring to hundreds of thousands of Americans who have been stricken first by disease and then by a Darwinian insurance system.

On Thursday, the six-month anniversary of the signing of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a number of its most central consumer protections take effect, just in time for the midterm elections.

Starting now, insurance companies will no longer be permitted to exclude children because of pre-existing health conditions, which the White House said could enable 72,000 uninsured to gain coverage. Insurers also will be prohibited from imposing lifetime limits on benefits.

The law will now forbid insurers to drop sick and costly customers after discovering technical mistakes on applications. It requires that they offer coverage to children under 26 on their parents’ policies.

It establishes a menu of preventive procedures, like colonoscopies, mammograms and immunizations, that must be covered without co-payments. And it allows consumers who join a new plan to keep their own doctors and to appeal insurance company reimbursement decisions to a third party.

The arrival of the long-awaited changes propelled President Obama, whose Democrats have struggled to exploit their signature achievement, into the backyard of Paul and Frances Brayshaw of Falls Church, Va., to explain his decision to pursue health care.

“The amount of vulnerability that was out there was horrendous,” Mr. Obama on Wednesday told a gathering of people chosen to illustrate the law’s new provisions. He said he concluded that “we’ve just got to give people some basic peace of mind.”

Mr. Obama also responded to Republican Congressional leaders who have campaigned on a threat to repeal the act. “I want them to look you in the eye,” he told his audience, and explain their opposition to a law that is projected to cover 32 million uninsured and reduce the deficit by $143 billion over 10 years.

The Republican strategy “makes sense in terms of politics and polls,” Mr. Obama said, an acknowledgment that the electorate is divided and that many swing districts are hostile. “It just doesn’t make sense in terms of actually making people’s lives better.”

House Republicans continued to question Mr. Obama’s assertions, which he repeated Wednesday, that the law will lower premiums, pointing to double-digit increases recently announced by many insurers. A blog posting on the Web site of the minority leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, predicted the law would “raise health care costs, explode the federal deficit and create a byzantine bureaucracy.”

The administration has estimated that premiums should rise no more than 2 percent because of the new consumer protections, and warned this month that it would have “zero tolerance” for efforts to blame the law for larger increases.

It will take years to determine the act’s long-term impact on American health, and on American politics. But Democrats did manage to front-load some notable benefits, while deferring the pain of tax increases and penalties until after the election.

Polls have found that many of the provisions taking effect Thursday are popular, tugging at a national sense of fairness and feeding off distrust of health insurers. They bear particular appeal for the 14 million people who must buy policies on the individual market rather than through employers and are thus at the mercy of the industry. And they land on the heels of a government report showing that the recession drove the number of uninsured Americans to 50.7 million in 2009, up 10 percent in a year.

As the political battle endures, those most immediately affected are welcoming the changes with collective relief, and hoping that their promise of security is real.

PPACA Section 9003 creates Internal Revenue Code Section 106(f). The new section will require users of health flexible spending arrangements (FSAs) and health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs) to get prescriptions before using health account funds to pay for over-the-counter (OTC) drugs other than insulin.

Section 9003 also will require holders of health savings accounts (HSAs) and Archer Medical Savings Accounts (Archer MSAs) to get prescriptions if they want to use account funds to buy OTC drugs. HSA and MSA holders who use account funds to buy OTC drugs without a prescription will have to include the expenditures in gross income and pay an additional 20% tax, officials say.

Health account holders can still use account funds to buy crutches, bandages, diagnostic devices and insulin without a prescription, officials say.

The new rules are set to take effect Jan. 1, 2011.

Holders of HSAs and Archer MSAs are responsible for substantiating use of account assets themselves, but employers and card providers are supposed to help