Like it or not, Medicare is here to stay. It ain't goin' away. What needs to be done is to make it competitive--as more people choose PRIVATE plans, the need for pure government subsidies will shrink.
Now, this bill has a problem in that it pushes off for SEVEN years a plan for partial competition between Medicare and private plans. BUT this isn't the end of the story! The President knows private competition is the way to go: once he wins another term, and if there is a cooperative Senate (hint hint: www.nrsc.org), he will be able to revise this law and make competition happen faster!
Consider what the Democrat Party Operatives would want: confiscatory taxes, huge government subsidies, eliminating competition, and soaking the companies and people who put their capital at risk trying to find life-saving drugs. The Republican plan, as flawed as it is, moves us--gradually--away from the Socialism of the 1960s.
Here is the flaw in your thinking (although I have offered up this idea in hope); the GOP is incapable of governing and will mess it up. It sounds good to get more in the House and Senate and then change the bill which doesn't take effect until 2006. But you are talking about the Republicans...they are too inept to make it happen.
They'd rather appease idiots like Sen. Snow and Collins from Maine or Chaffee from RI instead of kicking them off committees and backing more conservatives to run agaisnt them.
Are they still afraid they'll all pull a Jim Jeffords? Well, if in 2004 the GOP gains 5-6 Senate seats, they'll switch anyway if they are given goodies by the jerks on the left.