Timeframe

• Following a 216-to-215 vote in the House and a 55-to-40 vote in the Senate, President George W. Bush signed the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act into law. It went into effect on January 1, 2006.
  
  

Benefits

• Beneficiaries pay 25 percent of the cost of prescription drugs up to $2,700. After this limit is met, the beneficiary pays the full cost up to $4,350 as of 2009. Coverage kicks in again after this limit is reached.
  
  

Features

• One of the major provisions in the Medicare Prescription Drug law is its support of private businesses to provide drug coverage to retired employees. This comes in the form of subsidies to firms with retirement plans.
  
  

Size

• According to a report by Robert Moffitt from the Heritage Foundation, the Bush administration used false numbers to gain support from fiscally conservative members of Congress. Administration official Thomas A. Scully concealed the true estimate of the bill's ten-year cost, $534 billion as of 2003.
  
  

Significance

• In 2005, the White House Budget Office, as reported by the Washington Post, raised the full cost of the Medicare Prescription Drug law to a ten-year estimate of $1.2 trillion.