The Mae West Rx (UPDATE NYT's Dem-meme)

UPDATE: I’ve got to get those Democrat-meme monkeys in Times Square better trained to let me know when they’re performing. Late Friday night I wrote the below post, “The Mae West Rx.” Sunday, the New York Times prints a lengthy article about what Senator Grassley calls the Democrats’ “strategy of ‘inherent political hypocrisy and opportunism',” to eviscerate the free-market components of the Medicare prescription program to “allow Medicare to negotiate prices directly with drug companies” as a step toward nationalizing pharma and undermining inventiveness, and “impose new regulations on private drug plans,” to create stifling uniformity and undermine adaptiveness.

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“When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I’ve never tried before.” -- Mae West

That’s the new Medicare prescription program.

Rather than go the route of the entrenched 1965-model of medical care that is Medicare, rigidly directed by a central bureaucracy, with a virtual one-size-fits-all philosophy, the Medicare Part D prescription program relies upon the adaptivity and experience of private insurers and the self-responsibility of consumers to make choices.

Insurance companies negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies, administer the benefits, and offer a wide range of designs from which to choose. The result thus far is that the premiums for consumers have been about 1/3rd lower and the budget costs to the taxpayers about 20% lower than the “experts” predicted. See here.

As President Bush said the other day:

First of all, we've got to choose between two competing philosophies when it comes to health care. Behind all the rhetoric in Washington, and all the proposals, there's really a philosophical debate. On the one hand, there's some folks who…believe that government ought to be making the decisions for the health care industry. And there are some of us who believe that the health care industry ought to be centered on the consumer.

A recent survey supports the President, Americans preferring not to have a nationalized health care system. See here.

As Reuters reports:

Glitches in the new Medicare prescription drug benefit plan have affected about 3 percent to 5 percent of the millions of seniors and disabled people enrolled, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said on Monday....
Most people affected by the early problems were those who had been covered the Medicaid state-federal program for the poor but were supposed to be automatically switched to Medicare, federal officials have said.

Stop and think for a moment. Have you read in the MSM about the 95-97% of the 42-million Medicare recipients who are being adequately served by the new prescription benefit, or about the 3-5% who are having difficulties? Have you heard about the composition of the 3-5% having difficulties being largely those poorly educated, and even poorly motivated to control their own lives rather than being wards?

What’s at stake here is the left’s drive to settle for nothing less than a centrally controlled government-dictated health care system for America.

We’ve been going down that road since 1965. It’s time to follow Mae West. It’ll also be more fun.