My friend is furious about the new changes that are taking place. He has no idea what is covered or not.
It's really bad when Nokakula attacks his buddy Karl over this:
"It is said only in hushed tones and not by anybody of prominence, but a few brave souls in the Bush administration admit it. President Bush's Medicare drug benefit that went into effect Jan. 1 looks like a political blunder of far-reaching consequences. Furthermore, these critics assign major responsibility to Karl Rove."
Novakula says that the plan was not to help seniors, but to sign them up as voters.
"The drug plan was an audacious effort to co-opt the votes of seniors, reflecting Rove's grand design of building on the electoral majority by adding constituency groups. By failing to win new supporters while alienating old ones, the drug plan betrays a flaw in Rove's strategic overview and points to potentially disastrous consequences."
It seems like Delay put down the hammer on his own over the plan. Something he did quite regularly. In this interview with Bush, Brit Hume asked him about Tom Delay.
Bush : I like him and plus-ah- when he's over there we get out votes through the house---we've reformed medicare.
Just before Christmas of 2003, the White House and the House Republican leadership forced the drug benefit down the throats of unhappy conservatives. In a memorable pre-dawn session, resisting Republican House members were threatened with dire consequences and offered rich rewards as the roll call was held open for more than an hour to erase a 12-vote deficit.
What's Novakula's advice:
There is not much at this point that can be done about it, except to try to convince seniors and conservatives that the program is really not that bad.
Looks like Bush took his advice:
President Bush's top health advisers will fan out across the country this week to quell rising discontent with a new Medicare prescription drug benefit that has tens of thousands of elderly and disabled Americans, their pharmacists, and governors struggling to resolve myriad start-up problems.
How about they just fix the system.
Reddhedd: Here's an idea: how about we use that travel money to instead fix the damn program. You know, so senior citizens can get the drugs they need to keep them alive right now, instead of months down the road.
