Outlook Unclear on Prescription Drug Benefit

More than two months after the Senate and House passed comprehensive but different Medicare prescription drug bills, key lawmakers and well-connected lobbyists peg the chances for a successful compromise at only 50-50.

EL- This is a very bad plan that Bush is pushing to help his re-election. The only Democratic support it is getting is from those who figure that once it is in place the public will demand improvements.

"This bill is not really a great gift," Shane Creamer of Bluebell, Pa., said last week as he walked from a rally of several hundred AARP members to the Capitol Hill office of Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.).

At the same time, Creamer said, a Medicare drug benefit is "a question of life and death." If the high cost of medications "doesn't kill you physically," he said, "it kills your standard of living."

Creamer's comments tracked the results of a recent public opinion poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health. The survey found that while a majority of seniors wanted Congress to enact Medicare prescription drug coverage, three-quarters of seniors worried that even with such a benefit they would be left responsible for paying too much of their drug expenses.