Worldnetdaily
By Jon Dougherty
October 16, 2000
Source
As the Nov. 7 election nears, senior citizens have been treated to a host of Medicare-funded prescription drug plans offered by the candidates of both major political parties.
I have a better idea. Instead of adding another huge, expensive, inefficient and burdensome layer of bureaucracy to the bloated Medicare program, let's just scrap it instead and begin to teach Americans once more how to be self-sufficient and plan for their own retirement.
Crazy? Politically, perhaps, but that's the problem with Medicare in the first place, isn't it? It's too damned political. As long as it stays that way -- which will be forever -- then the program will remain broken, expensive and inefficient.
Think not? Well, consider that Medicare has been a government-run program from the outset. Through the years, has it become better or worse at delivering on its original promise of unfettered, universal health-care coverage for senior citizens?
I dare say if it was getting better, both major party candidates wouldn't be spending so much time in Florida and elsewhere, trying to explain a new drug benefit package that is simply going to be too expensive on our youth and younger workers in just a few years.
It's free market "cause-and-effect," much like the government's guarantee for student loans. Prices for colleges skyrocketed when politicians began "guaranteeing" loans for college-bound Americans -- as if every American really does "deserve" to go to college or is suited for college.
Speaking of medical care, the "guaranteed payment" principle once applied to hospitals and insurance companies. At one time, patients with any kind of insurance were often admitted to hospitals for dubious and inappropriate conditions. Many didn't require hospitalization, but doctors admitted those patients anyway because they knew insurance companies would simply write a check for the bill. The result? Escalating medical costs and draconian insurance "reform" measures in the mold of problematic HMOs.
Voters should not allow lawmakers to foist yet another burdensome layer of Medicare bureaucracy on our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They won't be able to afford it.
Granting more "subsidies for initial levels of drug spending will only increase incentives to over-use Medicare benefits and increase the cost of prescription drugs," wrote Tom Miller, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, on July 17, in discussing the House Republicans' prescription drug plan.
He's right. Medicare is incapable of being "fixed" as it is. Enlarging it will only make it worse -- and more expensive -- which will eventually cause Uncle Sam to cut it back again, just to "save money." It's a vicious circle, and it's getting us nowhere except further in debt and more reliant on Washington's "generosity." To hell with that.
Medicare was a bad mistake. We can repeat it -- over and over -- or we can scrap a program whose time never came.
"The seniors have demanded that any health care coverage they choose provide for some sort of prescription drugs benefit package," said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Texas Republican.
"What I view it as is we are headed for a train wreck, and we are trying to anticipate that train wreck and still provide the kind of health care our senior citizens deserve and are calling for," he said."
GOP Embraces Plan For Drug Entitlement
The Washington Times
By Stephen Dinan
June 13, 2003
Source
Republicans have come a long way from the mid-1990s, when then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich predicted Medicare's bureaucracy would "wither on the vine" and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole said he was proud to have voted against creating the program.
Now most Republicans in both the House and Senate are backing a new entitlement to prescription drugs as part of a $400 billion, 10-year overhaul of Medicare.
"It's just a huge, huge, huge new entitlement program in my view, and that's not what we as Republicans should be doing," said Arizona Rep. Jeff Flake, who voted against the 2002 House Republican version and said he doesn't think he will support this year's plan either.
The Senate Finance Committee passed its version of the overhaul last night, 16-5, with two conservative Republicans joining three Democrats in opposing it. Meanwhile, House Republicans announced their own proposal yesterday that they said combines reform with a new drug benefit.
The bills vary in their details, but both would cover a portion of seniors' prescription drug costs whether they choose to stay in traditional Medicare or move to a managed care option.
Republican leaders say their embrace of prescription drugs is not so much a change in philosophy as it is a marriage of the possible and the necessary.
"The seniors have demanded that any health care coverage they choose provide for some sort of prescription drugs benefit package," said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Texas Republican.
"What I view it as is we are headed for a train wreck, and we are trying to anticipate that train wreck and still provide the kind of health care our senior citizens deserve and are calling for," he said, adding that Republicans' proposal will encourage competition, which should bring down drug costs.
Rep. Billy Tauzin, Louisiana Republican and chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, which is writing part of the House bill, said Republicans had deep concerns over the fiscal condition of Medicare, but have always agreed that a drug program had to be done. He said now is the time.
"The term paper is due tomorrow," he said. "We've got to get whatever reforms we can get because seniors can't wait any longer for this benefit."
Polls show overwhelming support for a prescription drug program, with 77 percent of voters saying it is appropriate to spend taxpayer money on such a program, according to a February survey by Andres McKenna Polling and Research, a Republican strategy firm in Washington.
But there's no need to even look at the polls, said one conservative Republican committee chairman, speaking on the condition of anonymity: "Nobody needs a poll. All you have to do is show up in your district."
He said Republicans simply have to put a policy forward.
"There are two things we do here: We do policy, and we do politics," the chairman said. "When it comes to prescription drugs, it's the politics of prescription drugs."
Republican leaders said the nature of medicine has changed since Medicare's first year, in 1966. Since then, they said, prescription drugs have become a much more prominent part of health care. That means it must be addressed in federal health insurance programs.
"I think part of it is the realization that it is impossible to have a modern medical delivery system for seniors without inclusion of the most important tools to help seniors," said Sen. Rick Santorum, Pennsylvania Republican, who voted for the bill in the Finance Committee yesterday.
He and several other conservative senators say they would like to have seen a smaller bill than the $400 billion, 10-year figure the House and Senate are using.
Some Republicans say whatever Congress passes will inevitably grow beyond expectation.
In Medicare's first year, 1966, it had a budget of $1 billion for hospital insurance, which was expected to grow to $9 billion in 1990. In reality, by 1990 the cost of hospital insurance under Medicare was $66 billion. The administration says that 2004 Medicare will spend more than $250 billion in 2004 to cover care for about 41 million seniors and disabled persons.
Some conservatives also said that Congress has left the reform out as they have rushed to a prescription drug package.
"Frankly, some Republicans run scared and used bumper-sticker rhetoric rather than talking common sense on this issue," said Rep. Ernest Istook, Oklahoma Republican, who said Medicare and its 160,000 pages of regulations are tying doctors up in red tape and bankrupting the American medical system.
Mr. Istook and Mr. Flake were two of only eight Republicans to vote against the prescription drug bill in 2002.
Mr. Flake said in past years it was clear the Senate and House weren't going to be able to agree on a drug program, so there was no danger in voting for it. But by voting for it without linking it to broad Medicare reform, Republicans have tied themselves to getting something done this year, even if it violates their principles.
"I think that's what we really have done over the last four or five years — we've talked about it, and we've let Democrats define what ought to happen," Mr. Flake said.
He and others praised President Bush for demanding reform at the same time, but they worried that the president will end up signing a bill that violates the principles of reform he laid out — just as he did with campaign finance reform or the education bill, which in the end did not include school choice provisions.
Mr. Istook said it is Republicans in Congress who haven't followed through.
"I believe Republicans could have if they would have. Frankly there's too much pandering on the issue, and not enough honesty and common sense," Mr. Istook said.
• Amy Fagan contributed to this report.