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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (498426)	11/25/2003 1:10:33 PM
From: calgal	Respond to of 769670

NOV. 25, 2003: MEDICARE The basic deal on Medicare was supposed to be this: Republicans would offer Democrats a prescription drug benefit in exchange for major reform of the ailing entitlement. Instead, Republicans now seem to have traded the benefit for potential reform. I’m not disparaging the significance of Medical Savings Accounts or competition between plans and the other good things contained in the administration's Medicare reform bill. These positive changes might amount to something important later – but they also might not. Meanwhile, the drug entitlement willl grow and grow and grow. I recognize the political imperatives that led to this bill. Candidate Bush promised a drug benefit in the 2000 campaign, and polls confirm the issue’s continuing power. And I recognize too how essential it is that George Bush be re-elected. If he loses the election, the United States loses the war on terror. That said, the drug benefit is a very high price to pay .... One side advantage of the measure is that it should, at least, retire for good and all that absurd claim that President Bush is some kind of ideological extremist. Alas, and as I’ve been arguing for months, on economic issues his instincts and his practice are much less individualistic than Ronald Reagan’s were. It’s sobering to consider that with the prescription drug benefit, George W. Bush has created the first major new federal entitlement since Gerald Ford signed the Earned Income Tax Credit a quarter-century ago. If that isn’t “moderation,” what is? The outcome of the drug debate leaves me with this final heretical thought. Did conservatives and the administration possibly make a tactical error by holding so firmly onto the Bush tax cut after 9/11? I sometimes wonder (and wondered at the time) whether some partial retraction might not have done just as much to enhance Bush’s image as a moderate – while powerfully inoculating the country against future spending at a time when defense and national security ought to have first claim on the federal dollar. It sure would be nice to be able to reply to those demanding new spending and new entitlements: “Hey – don’t you know there’s a war on?” But if Republicans insist on peacetime tax rates, it’s hard to explain why Democrats should forswear peacetime spending plans. A tax rate can always be revisited later: Had Bush imposed a symbolic tax increase in 2001, he could have then proposed a symbolic tax cut when the troops came home from Iraq. But a new spending entitlement is forever. So here we are in 2003, with the Democrats getting something real - federally subsidized drugs for seniors – in exchange for the Republicans getting something theoretical: the possibility of reform down the road. I’d have preferred the deal to go the other way around …. Understand, the problem is not the drug benefit itself. As drugs become more important to healthcare, health insurance is bound to cover them. The problem is the idea that the government should insure every older American regardless of need – and adding this new component to that government insurance program makes that all-encompassing problem that much more costly and intractable.