I was going to sleep, honest I was, but I had to do one last thing with my computer, and I decided to look at this morning’s Washington Post, and there was this horrible, horrible headline: Medicare Drug Benefit May Cost $1.2 Trillion: Estimate Dwarfs Bush’s Original Price Tag.
“The White House released budget figures yesterday indicating that the new Medicare prescription drug benefit will cost more than $1.2 trillion in the coming decade, a much higher price tag than President Bush suggested when he narrowly won passage of the law in late 2003.
The projections represent the most complete picture to date of how much the program will cost after it begins next year. The expense of the new drug benefit has been a source of much controversy since the day Congress approved it, with Democrats and some Republicans complaining that the White House has consistently low-balled the expected cost to the government.
As recently as September, Medicare chief Mark B. McClellan said the new drug package would cost $534 billion over 10 years. Last night, he acknowledged that the cumulative cost of the program between 2006 and 2015 will reach $1.2 trillion, but he cited several major savings and offsets that he said will reduce the federal government’s bottom-line cost to $720 billion.
The disclosure prompted new criticism by Democrats about the administration’s long-term budget estimates. It also showed that Medicare, the national medical insurance program for seniors, may pose a far more serious budgetary problem in the com- ing decade than concerns about the solvency of Social Security. (…)
The new budget projections also show that seniors will face higher bills each year. A 10-year chart prepared by the Medicare actuaries estimates the drug premium will rise from $35 a month next year to $68 in 2015. Annual deductibles will start at $250 in 2006 and rise to about $472 in 2015, and the maximum annual out-of-pocket expense would be $6,800 that year.”
This is what you get when you make it illegal for the government to bargain with pharmaceutical companies to get low prices. And now I am going to sleep: even if I have one of my once – a – decade nightmares, it couldn’t possibly be worse than the deficit.
hilzoy, government has been “low balling” the cost of programs, well from the very beginning, see “big dig” for illustration.
the US pharma industry, better life through medication, along with generating well paying jobs. some how price controls would be counter productive to an industry which has been so successful. the history of the government management of medical care is to shift costs or constrain the delivery of services.
Bush might not be the Anti-Christ, but he’s certainly the most Anti-American president we’ve ever had.
the US pharma industry, better life through medication, along with generating well paying jobs
competition and finding lowest price available, good for private sector, for government, not much. yay conservatism.
government has been “low balling” the cost of programs, well from the very beginning, see “big dig” for illustration.
I’m not aware of another case in which a member of the Executive threatened to fire someone (in this case, the Chief Actuary) if he provided Congress with a better cost estimate. That’s a function of the level of mediocrity involved in this Administration; if the rules are too complicated for you to understand, and you still want to win, you’ve got to cheat.
Isn’t “constrain the delivery of services” exactly what HMO’s do?
It’s what they do for me, at least.
Before the rhetoric gets to heated, y’all might want to give the WaPo a day or two to print another retraction like this.
Of course, the retraction didn’t actually change the bottom line of the article, which was the existence of the 3% offset. The source of the money being removed to _create_ the offset was corrected; the offset itself, not so much.
I’m not aware of another case in which a member of the Executive threatened to fire someone
So you missed the middle of the 1960s and LBJ’s Admin.
Timmy, for the umpteenth time: would you mind coming right out and actually saying what the heck you mean, instead of employing these stupid oblique references to things that you never actually get around to naming? It’s a poor method of communication, it’s a poor method of _argumentation_, and as far as I can tell, it contributes nothing to the discussion. Frankly, given the number of times you’ve used these opaque interjections for threadjacks, it’s just plain rude. So would you mind cutting it out?