Granny Get Your Gun
Surprise, surprise, the President’s signature social program, the great $40 billion plus per year giveaway to drug companies called “Medicare prescription drug reform” has proven to be a nightmare… forcing numerous states to intervene at their own expense to prevent the elderly, poor and vulnerable from dying in the streets.
Let’s just start with the signature part of the signature program: the Medicare program cannot by law negotiate for lower prescription drug prices from Big Pharma… largely because the law was written for the benefit, and by lobbyists on the payroll of… Big Pharma.
Its “benefit” to members of the public, notably, elderly people and often poor and elderly people, was a secondary consideration (other than for electoral purposes.) Anyway, the WaPo piece cited notes that pharmacists contend they were not trained in the new system, and even those who were found the training ridiculously useless as far as actually dealing with the public in a hopelessly non-responsive system; it seems (you’ll be shocked about this) that the private insurers to whom much of the responsibility has been shifted (away from State governmental programs) frequently don’t answer their phones or are useless when they do. Shocking. Just shocking.
The Republicans in Congress have got to be shaking about this one: the kind of people who vote in Congressional elections take their governmental health benefits very, very seriously. Given that it is unclear whether we knocked off Al Qaeda’s “Number Two” Dr. Al-Zawahiri in the aerial “pre-Alito vote” assault against Pakistan overnight (though we did clearly knock off most of a Pakistani family including quite a few children)… we can be reasonably sure that a key part of the GOP strategy will come down to the clockwork-like appearance of an OBL video to be released in early October telling yon voters that “A vote for Democrats is a vote to let A.Q. murder your children (and grandchildren.)”
We’ll see. Given the staggering governmental ineptitude following Katrina, and now the breaking of a perfectly good governmental entitlement program just to enrich Big Pharma but calling it a “prescription drug benefit” may (making the very unrealistic assumption that Democrats still won’t f*** it up) finally cost the party-who-doesn’t-care-about-the-little-people TM one or (quite possibly) both Houses of Congress. This may be one of them accountability momentsTM. Again, we’ll see…
