With federal medical insurance programs, change is hard

Part D was less popular than Obamacare when it launched

By Sarah Kliff, WashPost, Updated: June 21, 2013

Health and Human Services is in the opening throes of attempting to enroll millions of Americans in a brand new, and relatively unpopular, health insurance program. It’s a massive task only made more difficult by widespread opposition and political divisions.

But it is, as Sabrina Corlette puts it, “not the federal government’s first time at the rodeo.”

Eight years ago, the federal government rolled out Medicare Part D, a prescription drug benefit. For the first time ever, Medicare was launching a benefit administered exclusively through private health insurance plans. The benefit was not popular: In the spring of 2005, when enrollment efforts ramped up, polls showed Medicare Part D to be less popular than the Affordable Care Act. Fewer Americans felt they understood how it worked, too.

Corlette and her colleagues at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms recently finished one of the more in-depth comparisons between the roll out of Medicare Part D in 2005 and the Affordable Care Act now.

(More here.)