Kaiser Health News: “A new study finds that Medicare is spending billions of dollars more than it needs to on prescription drugs for low-income seniors and disabled beneficiaries. In 2013, an estimated 10 million people who participate in the Medicare prescription drug program, known as Part D, received government subsidies to help pay for that coverage. They account for an estimated three-quarters of the program’s cost. Most of those low-income enrollees are randomly placed in a plan that costs less than the average for the region where the person lives. But even though these are lower-cost plans, they often end up costing the government and the beneficiary more. If Medicare instead assigned those people to a drug plan based on the actual drugs they took, it could save those patients hassle and money, and potentially save the government billions of dollars, according to the study by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh.  The study appears in the June issue of the policy journal Health Affairs. Using a 5 percent sample of Medicare drug claims data from 2008 and 2009, the researchers calculated that if Medicare had matched beneficiaries to drug plans using “intelligent reassignment,” rather than random chance,  the government would have saved $5 billion in 2009. That’s because the government is responsible for picking up the copayments for many low-income beneficiaries.”