To be fair, it wasn’t Democrats who crammed an unaffordable Medicare prescription drug benefit down our throats, was it? Today’s Democrats are Marxists, but the Republicans are acting like Democrats from 25 years ago. There’s a whole lot of ‘em, in both parties, that need to be run out of office...soon. I only hope enough Americans have the discipline and morality to do what is right. It means many of us will have to vote against our own immediate self interest, but for all the left’s talk about doing things “for the children” we’re the ones who actually have children and want to preserve what we had for them.
I’m no fan of the medicare prescription drug benefit, but I will nonetheless say a couple things in its defense:
A) Costs actually did come in lower than CBO projections which given government programs, is close to a miracle.
B) In theory the program should save money on costs of the greater Medicare program because treating a lot of issues with preventative drugs is much cheaper than the surgery which would follow in the absence of the drug (ie. Lipitor now vs. a bypass later).
Mind you I don’t much buy into it either since broke is broke, and spending money to ‘save money’ generally is a bogus assumption. As most seniors had the sense to take those drugs on their own, and buy a form of insurance or some other plan to help with them, to make a federal program was a waste.
The simple truth is that it was a political ploy to court seniors. It was not exactly a high point of the GOP congress.