POLITICS: Prescription for Political Disaster
Fund, John H.
POLITICS JOHN H. FUND Prescription for Political Disaster ~e BED BARNES, THE WEEKLY STANDAtU) editor who also hosts a Fox News show, has written a highly sympathetic book on the Bush...
...It's not a rosy picture, and the news doesn't get better...
...Eventually, the inspector general of Health and Human Services concluded that Medicare administrator Tom Scully had ordered the chief actuary to withhold information on the cost from Congress, an action that would have subjected him to disciplinary action if he were still in the government...
...By July of that year, columnist Robert Novak said the gloom had spread to White House officials, who privately admitted to him that the bill "was a disaster substantively and politically...
...But it also hadn't hurt them-perhaps because it hadn't started yet...
...To put that number into perspective, the actuaries estimated it represented in present value terms 1.9 percent of the nation's total domestic product forever...
...GOP members were bullied into voting for the bill by being told that if this effort failed, the House leadership would call up the even more expensive Democratic alternative and pass it...
...Still, even Barnes admits it's "a fair question whether Bush conservatism is philosophically consistent...
...It would have involved a more modest benefit that was coupled with significant reforms of Medicare that would have improved its solvency...
...It may be a blip, but it is getting bigger and starting to blink "DANGER" furiously...
...Although the need for basic change along market-based lines persists, nobodyhas the will to revisit this issue anytime soon...
...But something can be worse than nothing, especially if it is assembled in a slapdash fashion in the dead of night with flawed cost estimates knowingly attached to the program...
...Don Manzullo of Illinois told me last year...
...APRIL 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 45...
...S FOR THE 2004 ELECTION, polls by the Tarrance Group found no evidence that the program had helped the Republicans politically...
...The program officially kicked off on January 1, 2006, and so far it has proven to be a bust...
...I won't try to kid you...
...The final bill greatly displeased conservatives such as former House Majority Leader Dick Armey...
...There is buyers' remorse among many who voted for it," South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham said in February 2004, only three months after the program's enactment...
...The final product was rammed through on one of the longest roll-call votes in House history, a three-hour marathon that ended shortly before 6 5.M...
...Now we'll see if the blip explodes over the Republican Congress in this fall's elections...
...The bill for that would be the equivalent of 26 percent of all personal income tax payments today...
...Republicans felt they absolutely had to pass something to take Medicare "off of the table" for the 2004 election because House Speaker Denny Hastert and other GOP leaders had promised voters that Congress would pass something...
...As it was, he left for a private sector job shortly after it passed...
...In 2005, the Medicare trustees estimated that the long-term cost of the program over the next 75 years would be $18.2 trillion...
...Despite the expenditure of $400 million in government funds for a PR campaign, less than a fifth of the 8 million seniors who are eligible have signed up for the program...
...He makes a plausible argument for many Bush policies that I disagree with, but spect...
...Bush justifies the entire package because "his view of government is Hamiltonian: It's a valuable tool to achieve security, prosperity, and the common good...
...By July of that year, columnist Robert Novak said the gloom had spread to White House officials, who privately admitted to him that the bill "was a disaster substantively and politically...
...Everyone conspired to create the fiction that the benefit would cost only $400 billion over the next decade...
...The golden opportunity for Medicare reform was squandered...
...But it was known within the administration that the actual estimate was $540 billion, and key House and Senate leaders strongly suspected the estimates were wildly off...
...As economist Bruce Bartlett puts it, "the individual income tax would have to rise by 26 percent immediately and forever just to pay for the drug program...
...Those of you on the front line have been expressing your deep concern that SSA is not positioned well to help people understand, enroll in and negotiate" the discount drug program, wrote Linda McMahon, deputy commissioner of operations, in a private memo to SSA employees in February...
...Today, the ten-year cost of the benefit is estimated to be over $800 billion, and heading north...
...I bled all over the House floor that night, and I will not knuckle under like that again...
...We're going to come back again and again and again and fight to make sure that we have a good program...
...Senator Ted Kennedy told CNN he viewed the drug program as "just a down payment" on a much larger entitlement...
...The new bill ditched most of the reforms in favor of "demonstration projects" that Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson admitted afterwards he never expected would become reality...
...How did the prescription drug bill happen under a GOP president and Congress...
...His strategy is to use government as a means to achieve conservative ends...
...John H, Fund, The American Spectator's Politics columnist, is author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (Encounter Books...
...When we act like liberals, we lose," he warns, and he views the prescription drug bill as about as liberal with the taxpayer's money as you can get...
...Bush when it comes to the administration's 2003 prescription drug benefit bill, the largest creation of an entitlement program since the Great Society...
...But even he jumps the U.S.S...
...But that doesn't mean a flood of angry, confused, or ineligible seniors haven't been clogging the phone lines and offices of the Social Security Administration (SSA), which is responsible for administering the program...
...Even so, the final product didn't satisfy Democrats, many of whom dream of a national health care system...
...The Wall Street Journal concluded that "It is undeniable that the Medicare bill wouldn't have passed in its current form had $540 billion been the accepted cost fiction...
...Barnes admits that "Reagan would not have liked the program" even though he would have cheered the plan's expansion of health savings accounts, "which gives more choice, and more competition in health care markets...
...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 2006 JOHN H. FUND T HE PRESIDENT HAD INSISTED that he wanted a bill before the 2004 election, and he had willing enablers in the GOP congressional leadership and bureaucracy...
...Social Security spokesman Mark Hinkle told the Washington Post that the McMahon memo addressed a broader set of SSA concerns beyond the drug plan...
...Almost as soon as the bill passed Congress, the second guessing began...
...The government is on track to spend about $250 in administrative costs alone for each person it enrolls...
...That may change with this year's elections...
...This is going to be a very difficult year...
...Armey tried to push through a better bill before he retired from the House at the end of 2002...
...He notes that in 2005 the President proposed to reduce Social Security's unfunded liabilities when two years earlier he was "ballooning" Medicare's liabilities with the prescription drug benefit...
...It was awful," Rep...
...Politically, several House members told me their internal polls showed 2 to 1 or even 3 to 1 levels of hostility towards the program...
...Such numbers mean something...
...POLITICS JOHN H. FUND Prescription for Political Disaster ~e BED BARNES, THE WEEKLY STANDAtU) editor who also hosts a Fox News show, has written a highly sympathetic book on the Bush presidency called Rebel-in-Chief...
...He characterized the senior concern over the program as a "blip on the screen...
...The night's arm-twisting still brings out strong emotions in some members...
Vol. 39 • April 2006 • No. 3
