Health: Take Two Aspirin and Read This Now

A month ago, Tracy Patterson was simply a woman with more than her fair share of sickness. With multiple birth defects, chronic pain, asthma and bipolar disorder, Patterson, 35, struggled to get by on $832 a month in disability assistance. But at least one thing in her life was taken care of. California's Medicaid program paid for more than a dozen medications every month. "I always got my meds on time," she says. That changed on Jan. 1, when Medicare's prescription-drug benefit went into effect. Patterson was one of 6.2 million people automatically shifted into the program from Medicaid, and her story has become part of an urgent, nationwide call to fix what both Republicans and Democrats say was a botched transition to the controversial new plan.

Patterson says the abrupt switch has pushed her to the edge. She spent a week without medication, trying to figure out the new plan, called Medicare Part D, and then learned that under the terms of her policy, she would have to pay $308.68 for a month's supply of morphine, which she takes for her chronic pain. "I flipped out," she says. "First I was shocked, then I started crying. Now I'm just numb. I'm bipolar. I'm kind of getting depressed." Patterson sobs at the idea of borrowing money she can't pay back. "Whoever voted this into policy was a bunch of jerks, and they never knew what it was like to live on a fixed income and have to have medication."

Any policymakers who once might have glossed over her frustration as a side effect of sudden change are thinking twice. "Katrina showed government's failure to respond, and we can't afford those failures again," says Republican Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota. A quarter of the 24 million people now enrolled in Medicare Part D are "dual eligibles," people who qualify for both Medicaid and Medicare. In other words, they are among the poorest and frailest people in the country. More than 70% of them make less than $10,000 a year; 372,000 of them have Alzheimer's. Republicans realize that after Katrina, they cannot risk another crisis in which the government appears to be abandoning its most vulnerable citizens. Some are already making that connection. Aniela Toscano, 56, a New Yorker living in a shelter, has run up $885 in credit-card debt thanks to a brand-new bill for drugs and is worried that she can no longer afford her seizure medication. "What happened in New Orleans?" she says. "They let those people die. Why not us?"