Maine’s two congressmen – Tom Allen and Mike Michaud – are working to fix one of the biggest shortcomings in the Medicare prescription drug benefit passed last year.

The deeply flawed bill was rammed through a reluctant Congress by the Republican leadership, who worked with the Bush administration to conceal the true cost of the program, now estimated at more than $530 billion over 10 years.

The law is confusing even in its simplest phase, and many eligible seniors have refused to participate. As an enticement for privatizing parts of Medicare, seniors were offered a prescription drug benefit. Unfortunately, the law does nothing to control drug prices, and doesn’t provide complete coverage for seniors. The biggest beneficiaries are the drug companies.

Excluded from the original are provisions to allow the government to negotiate for lower drug prices. Already, the U.S. government negotiates the prices for the drugs it buys for veterans, but the law intentionally prohibits negotiating for lower prices for seniors. The net effect is that the United States subsidizes lower drug costs in countries such as Canada.

Maine’s two Republican senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, support competing measures that would allow the re-importation of drugs from Canada and other industrialized countries. We support those efforts, and particularly Snowe’s proposal.

But re-importation is a cockeyed solution to the problem of high drug costs faced by America’s seniors. It’s a stopgap measure at best. Like the bus trips organized to take seniors north of the border so they can buy cheaper drugs, the solution does nothing to combat the high cost of drugs here. It only takes advantage of Canada’s successful price negotiations while leaving the majority of American drug consumers on the hook.

Allen and Michaud are backing two pieces of legislation with the aim of plugging the gaps in the original Medicare drug bill.

One would create a national prescription discount drug card as an alternative to the more than 70 cards now available to seniors. The cards are meant to lower the cost for medicine for seniors until the Medicare drug benefit begins in 2006. The current system is complex and seniors have shown their displeasure by not signing up. According to Allen and Michaud, nationally only about 10 percent of those eligible have signed up for the cards. The idea behind a national card would be to simplify the choices and give the government the opportunity to negotiate for the best discounts on all covered drugs.

The second bill would authorize the government to negotiate drug prices when the full drug benefit begins in 2006.

The Medicare drug benefit passed under dubious circumstances. The proposals by Allen and Michaud would put a bandage on a bad law that is otherwise doomed.

It’s unlikely any action will come this year, with the same leadership that passed the law still calling the shots. But something needs to be done to contain the cost of the Medicare benefit and simplify it for seniors. Otherwise it’s just a boondoggle fated to fail.