Medicare reform?

This week across America, children and teenagers are busy obsessing over Michael Jackson or the latest news from the twisted world of hip-hop, while their older contemporaries, young adults, were wondering who they were going to "hook up" with over the weekend and making sure their meaningful and enlightened existence leaves enough time to watch "Entertainment Tonight" on the tube.

In the meantime, politicians in Washington were busy staking out a claim to an ever-larger share of whatever money these young Americans will be able or allowed to earn over the next 40 years.

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I fully expect that by Thanksgiving Day, our illustrious Congress will have passed the largest expansion of Medicare in its 38-year history – a prescription-drug benefit program for our wizened citizens. There is no demonstrated need for this program whatsoever, but pass it they will. After all, there are votes to be bought!

By now, I'm sure you've heard that this drug benefit is supposed to cost around $400 billion over the next 10 years. That's just the beginning, my friends. What you haven't heard is that it will cost between $1.3 to $2 trillion for the next 10 years! That's right, $2 trillion ... and experience shows us that it will quite probably be even higher! All of this money for a program that is not needed!

When Medicare asked its own customers about their difficulty in obtaining their prescription drugs, over 85 percent said they had no trouble whatsoever. How many ran into serious problems? Just a shade over 4 percent ... that's it. So, for this 4.2 percent, we're going to enact the biggest spending program in decades and apply it to 100 percent of seniors. Wow, what a deal.

Even though most seniors experience no problems whatsoever in obtaining their prescription drugs, that doesn't mean they want to pay for them. If they can just use their voting clout to coerce Congress into making someone else pay for those drugs, so much the better! There is, after all, nothing quite as satisfying as boosting your discretionary income at the expense of future generations of taxpayers.

Simply put, the Democrats and Republicans who voted for this massive boondoggle this week placed a mortgage on the future earnings of today's younger taxpayers. The proceeds of that mortgage are being used to buy votes from senior citizens in next year's election. Then, four years from now when another presidential election comes around, Congress will refinance the mortgage to increase the burden on your future earnings in order to buy the next round of senior votes.

With every passing election cycle, we'll see promises of increased benefits at lower costs. Plus, if any politician dares to step forward to suggest reforms or cutbacks in the system, others – principally Democrats – will howl bloody murder about that evil politician who wants to take away Grandma's prescription drugs.

The drug companies, of course, couldn't be happier. For years, they've had variations of a "lifeline" program which provides drugs at zero or low cost to wizened citizens who wanted but could not afford them. Now those drugs will all be paid for with taxpayer funds! Watch the drug-company stocks ... my guess is they'll do quite well this week.

Large corporations have much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving also. Many of these corporations are providing prescription-drug benefits for their retirees. Now that we have a drug benefit under Medicare, they'll be able to drop that coverage. The drug-benefit bill does provide for some hefty subsidies to corporations to get them to continue with that coverage ... but, in the end, most of them will bail and their former employees will head for Medicare.

So, everybody pretty much wins here. AARP gets to claim a victory for its members, politicians get votes, drug companies get paid and corporations get to enhance their bottom lines by dumping drug coverage for retirees. The only losers are the taxpayers, and the ones who will lose the most are the ones who aren't paying attention and who don't vote anyway. Politics, like you know, bores them.

Democrats wanted to filibuster this bill – not because they opposed the drug benefit, but because there were some weak-as-a-kitten proposals for private-sector competition in a limited number of cities about seven years from now. Big deal. The Democrats' real problem was they didn't want to lose wizened votes to the Republicans next year.

I almost wish the Democrats had succeeded at their filibuster attempt. At least that would have delayed this disaster for a time ... perhaps a time that could have been used for more people to realize what a grand mistake this is going to be.