Funny thing. I do some of my best thinking in the shower, and this morning I wondered what Ron Paul would have to say about this weekend's huge expansion of the entitlement state. As it turns out, I didn't have to wonder long... Tom points to the Congressman's timely piece on the failures of Republicans to battle the growth of government.
I'm thinking harder and harder about gathering support for a write-in drive for Rep. Paul for President in '04.
(be sure to check out Tom's comments section, where liberal commenter Finn displays some good old fashioned left-wing ignorance...)
Two other commentaries on the prescription-drug boondoggle. First, Robert Samuelson ("Medicare as Pork Barrel") shows it wasn't really needed in the first place. Think vast numbers of seniors are going without prescriptions they can't afford? It just isn't so:
[A] government survey of Medicare recipients in 2002... asked this question: "In the last six months, how much of a problem, if any, was it to get the prescription medicine you needed?" The answers were: 86.4 percent, not a problem; 9.4 percent, a small problem; 4.2 percent, a big problem. Medicare has about 41 million beneficiaries, so even 4.2 percent represents about 1.7 million people. The survey doesn't say whether their problems reflected high drug costs, doctors' reluctance to write prescriptions or something else. But most people can somehow afford drugs.
So, for those 1.7 million people, we've created a bank-busting entitlement program, a perpetual blank check, as a bribe to 41 million people. Scratch that. The 41 million aren't the ones who wanted this bill... it was the special interests. The elder lobby, the insurance companies, the drug companies, and the corporate pension plans looking to drop drug coverage.
E.J. Dionne accuses the Dems of rolling over and spreading their legs for the bill in "The Democrats Take a Dive":
The battle over a Medicare prescription drug benefit proves that Republicans are ruthless and determined and that Democrats are divided and hapless. Republicans have changed the rules in Washington, but some Democrats still pretend to be living in the good old days.... If Democrats wanted to give Bush a political victory, they could have insisted on a much better deal. Instead, their negotiators sold out for a bill full of subsidies to the HMOs that will make it harder to control drug costs. The moral, yet again, is that Republicans are much tougher than Democrats and fight much harder to win.
It's not the first time the Democrats have turned jellyfish, and it won't be the last.
Posted by wasylik at November 25, 2003 05:57 PM | TrackBack