Why did Congress create the doughnut hole in the first place?
The doughnut hole is all about the money. The Republican-controlled Congress in 2003 ponied up $400 billion for the Part D benefit over 10 years – but that wasn’t enough to construct a benefit that didn’t have a gaping hole. “There is no policy justification for the doughnut hole,” said Gail Wilensky, a former head of the Medicare agency and an adviser to numerous Republican lawmakers. “The politicians wanted to keep the deductible low enough to touch a lot of people.” Indeed, even among opponents of the current legislation, filling the doughnut hole remains uncontroversial. “Nobody ever liked it,” said Robert Moffit, a policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “It was literally a product of the congressional imagination created in order to meet budgetary requirements.” How much will it cost to fill the doughnut hole? An estimate by the Congressional Budget Office says closing the coverage gap will cost the federal government $42.6 billion by 2019. But, the federal subsid
