The new Medicare law is a bait and switch. Congress and
President Bush claim the law will make the health care system
better, but in actuality it may destroy it. This change is a real
problem for America’s elderly. And it will be an even greater
problem for generations X and Y in the coming years.
Medicare provides the elderly insurance benefits covering a wide
range of services, including hospital stays, hospice care,
emergency room visits and X-rays. In December, Congress passed a
bill changing the way the federal program works and the services it
pays for. On the surface, the law is appealing. But this
façade is a con to convince Americans to support it ““
much like the U.S. war in Iraq.
It’s a cleverly made law. It includes a provision that
gives money to seniors so they can buy prescription drugs, which
are a large part of many seniors’ spending. Before this
legislation, about 10 million seniors went without prescription
drug coverage. Now these people will now be able to buy their
medication. This part of the bill makes it nearly impossible to
oppose the bill without appearing heartless. You don’t want
to give money to our nations’ elderly just so they can have
medicine? You monster!
But there are other parts of this law that will actually harm
Medicare. Indeed, it may well kill Medicare in the future. The law
prevents cost-saving on health care and will eventually force
Medicare to compete with private insurance companies.
With regard to the first point, Senator Durbin, D-Illinois,
explained it best on C-SPAN, saying “this bill is designed so
that the federal government is prohibited from bargaining and
negotiating for lower prices for seniors.” Durbin also states
this bill “has no cost containment built into it.” This
is important because the price of drugs (and U.S. health care in
general) goes up every year by leaps and bounds. No amount of
benefits for drugs will be worth anything if this trend
doesn’t stop.
So how do you stop it? Have the government fight for lower
prices for its citizens; other countries do it all the time. In
fact, the bill in its original form would have done this.
But Bush, along with the pharmaceutical industry, managed to
lobby these parts out. The Washington Post reports that these were
“provisions that would have allowed Americans to legally
import drugs from Canada and Europe, where medications retail for
as much as 75 percent less than in the United States. Polls show
that an overwhelming majority supports the change, and the House
approved the provision” before Bush and company killed
it.
Other parts of this bill seem “intended to undermine the
whole system,” writes Yale economics professor Paul Krugman
in The New York Times. He says that by making Medicare compete with
the private insurance industry, the new law could cause the whole
program to collapse, which will eliminate health care for millions
of Americans.
So how is this like Iraq? The scam was the same there: It lured
you in with one idea but gave you something else in the end. Bush
and company pulled the American public in with the specter of
terrorism by saying Saddam Hussein could one day give WMD to
terrorists like Osama bin Laden. But what you got were no WMD, an
occupied Iraq, hundreds of dead U.S. soldiers and thousands more
wounded. Similarly, they will lure you into supporting this law by
telling you it will help seniors, when in the long term, it could
very well kill off Medicare and hurt those very seniors.
Already, large cracks are showing in both arguments. Last
Thursday’s admission by former U.S. Weapons Inspector David
Kay regarding U.S. pre-war intelligence on Iraqi WMD that “we
were all wrong” is eerily similar to Bush’s admission
the same day that the new Medicare plan will cost at least $134
billion more than he initially said it would. In both cases we are
getting something very different from what was first offered.
The new law is bad news for American seniors. And it’s
even worse news for us. By crippling Medicare and preventing the
government from negotiating lower prices, not only will our younger
generation of Americans face even more ridiculous health care costs
in the future, but we’ll have no Medicare to help us.
And to top it off, all the while that Medicare is wasting away
in the coming years, we will be paying for it though we are never
to receive its benefits when we get old. As for fixing this
problem, I don’t have a complete answer yet. I do know it
begins with realizing we are getting conned, and who’s behind
it.
Raimundo is a fifth-year economics and political science
student. E-mail him at araimundo@media.ucla.edu. Send general
comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.