Medicare Drug Benefit beholden to special Interests, says
New York Times
The new Medicare law is "an object lesson in how special
interests hold
America's health care
system hostage," columnist Paul Krugman writes in a
New York Times
opinion piece. The "haste with which key players in the drug
bill's passage cashed in" makes their "claims that they
wrote a pharma-friendly Medicare bill out of genuine concern
for the public's welfare look ludicrous," Krugman continues.
Krugman cites as an example former Rep. Billy Tauzin
(R-La.), "who shepherded the drug bill through when he was a
member of Congress" and now earns an estimated $2 million
annually as head of the
Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. In
addition, former CMS administrator Tom Scully received a
"special waiver from the ethics rules" to "negotiate for a
future health industry lobbying job at the very same time he
was pushing the drug bill," Krugman notes.
The new Medicare law is "a corrupt deal passed by a corrupt
system, ... [a]nd it was a very expensive deal indeed,"
Krugman says. He adds that according to Medicare trustees,
"the fiscal gap over the next 75 years created by the new
law -- not the financing gap for Medicare as a whole, just
the additional gap created by the legislation created 18
months ago -- will be $8.7 trillion."
Krugman writes that he has a "suggestion for Mr. Bush. One
way to prove that he's really sincere about addressing
long-run fiscal problems, that his calls for benefit cuts
aren't just part of an ideological agenda, would be to put
Social Security aside for a while and fix his own Medicare
program" (Krugman,
New York Times,
5/6).
