Suckas of the Week

The White House yesterday released figures estimating the cost of the Medicare drug benefit package passed in late 2003 at $720 billion for the 10 year period 2006-1015. At the time it was passed, the Congression Budget Office estimated 10 years of benefits would not exceed $400 billion. While Dr. Mark B. McClellan, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, insists that the original cheaper estimate did not include the years 2014 and 2015, others eschew this attempt at re-framing the expense period. "Since it was sold as a $400 billion program, that's what we should keep it at," said the new chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire. Suckas? Those 220 members of the House that passed the bill (as opposed to those 215 that voted against it). The legislation, which actually prevents the government from bargaining with drug companies for better drug prices, is a model of using the false pretense of lasseiz-faire and conservative free-market ideology to subsidize private industry with taxpayer money. As the Wall Street Journal, hardly a bastion of editorial support for "big government", reported in November 2003: "[c]orporate lobbying groups are emerging as winners, having pushed hard for a bill in order to shift some of their costs to the government...companies can opt in, taking the proposed tax-free federal subsidy and shifting some costs to the government, or opt out and possibly cut or eliminate their own coverage altogether, a trend that is already under way."

For the weeks of Jan. 31 and Feb. 7