CMS DECLARES INSURERS FINALLY READY TO WALK ON THEIR OWN, RIGHT AS SENIORS LEARN TO CRAWL TO THE PHARMACY
The government pulls the training wheels off Medicare Part D subsidies, and grandma pulls a hamstring reaching the counter.
In a moving ceremony best described as a toddler's first steps if the toddler were a multibillion-dollar insurance conglomerate, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced it will not renew the drug plan subsidy that has kept Part D premiums from resembling a phone number. Officials say insurers have grown, matured, and are finally ready to stand on their own two feet — coincidentally at the exact moment America's actual senior citizens are being asked to stand for much, much longer at the pharmacy counter, which cardiologists are now unofficially classifying as light cardio.
The non-renewal notice reportedly arrived in the same envelope as a cheerful new 'optional' $47 'market adjustment fee,' which insurers stressed is completely voluntary in the same way breathing is optional. 'Premiums will simply find their natural level,' said CMS spokesperson Denise Ferrywell, adjusting a chart that was, for legal reasons, just an upward-pointing arrow taped to a stick. 'And that natural level is up. It was always going to be up. Up is very natural.' Insurers, for their part, released a statement thanking the American senior for 'believing in independence' before disappearing into a waiting Lincoln Town Car.
Anchorman Ron Rugundy closed the segment leaning hard into the studio desk, mustache trembling with civic feeling. 'This is a bold vote of confidence in the free market, and a bold vote of no-confidence in your grandmother's blood pressure medication,' he intoned. 'I'm not going to sugarcoat this. I don't know how. Frankly, at these prices, neither does she.' Sources confirm insurers haven't looked this relieved since the day they invented the co-pay, an innovation historians still refer to as 'the shot heard round the deductible.'
