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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs
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To: TimF who wrote (39009)11/25/2009 4:10:47 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof  Read Replies (1) of 71588
 
Re: "It was primarily a giveaway to the recipients of those drugs"

Of course! (That much is OBVIOUS.)

Still, insofar as the government was *prohibited* from negotiating for lower prices with the Big Pharma companies that would supply all of these newly-paid-for-by-the-government medicines, it was ALSO a big, big (hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars worth to their bottom lines) giveaway to those corporate interests who saw their sales and revenue spike upwards.

However, and this gets back to my main point (which I see you have dropped <g>) that there was NO REVENUE SOURCE put in place to PAY FOR any of this new federal entitlement, and no off-setting cuts in any other SPENDING either!

So 100% of this new entitlement's cost just got added straight to the federal structural deficits going forward.

(And we see that the Bush era Medicare part D change cost was even a LARGER EXPENSE then the new health care reform proposals which are circulating right now. They at least have the benefit of having the costs fully offset by dedicated revenue sources and offsetting cost cuts, NONE of which did Bush's part D entitlement have. So, even if *some* of these new offsetting cost cuts turn out to be unrealistic... the whole effort is still WORLD'S APART form the COMPLETELY DEFICIT FINANCED Bush era thing.)

Also true with the Trillion and a half for the twin wars --- *all of which* Bush not only kept officially "off the annual budgets" but also never PAID FOR except by ever more federal borrowing... for he never raised any revenues as we always had in the past to pay for our wars, nor did he propose off-setting savings from other spending cuts.....
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