WASHINGTON, April 28 (UPI) -- Congress is unlikely to approve extending the looming deadline for enrollment in Medicare's Part D prescription-drug plan, congressional backers of the extension acknowledged this week.
Part D enrollment is set to close May 15, after which seniors who sign up will have to pay a 1-percent-per-month financial penalty on their premiums. Critics have made extending the deadline a key issue in response to frustration from seniors left baffled by dozens of plan choices in each state.
But Senate Republicans and Democrats supporting the extension now say they lack the votes and the time to pass it before May 15; the crowded Senate schedule is packed with debates on immigration, war spending and taxes in the next two weeks.
"We'll try, but I don't think we'll be able to get this done," Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said in an interview. "They'll probably be able to thwart our attempts to extend it," said Dorgan, a member of the Senate Democratic leadership.
Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., the chief sponsor of a bill extending the deadline until the end of the year, acknowledged Thursday that he lacked sufficient support in the Senate. "We have gotten as high as 53 votes, but under Senate procedure you have to have 60. As of now, we don't," he said.
More than 30 million of Medicare's 43 million beneficiaries are enrolled in Part D, which began paying benefits in January. Opinion polls show that about 75 percent of participating seniors approve of the program.
Still, most of those now enrolled were signed up automatically, leading to fears that the remaining millions won't voluntarily enroll in the next two weeks.
Republican leaders in the House and Senate have resisted extending the deadline under strong urging from the White House. President Bush has repeatedly said he opposes an extension.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, echoed Bush yesterday in an interview, noting that the cutoff date would motivate remaining seniors to sign up. "If you don't have a deadline, people don't move," she said. "We're seeing so many more coming on now that they see that it's not a horror story."
Many lawmakers faced strong reactions from constituents in the first two to three months of Part D's rollout, as seniors complained of complicated signup procedures and difficulties obtaining prescriptions at pharmacies.
But that pressure now seems to have waned, said Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore. Smith, who supports extending the May 15 deadline, said that for months Part D was "topic A" in his meetings with constituents but that in at least 10 recent town-hall meetings "it was mentioned once."
Smith said his colleagues are feeling less pressure from angry seniors and hearing more from satisfied ones. "This is turning from a political negative rapidly to a political positive," Smith said in an interview. "My palpable sense is the tide has turned."
