Medicare overdosing on drugs

The Medicare prescription drug benefit package Congress is crafting has no redeeming socioeconomic value.

This is not the view of an impartial observer. Rather, it's the view of someone who stands to become a prime beneficiary of this misguided largess in the not-too-distant future.

As beneficial as it promises to be for me and my wife, however, its intergenerational consequences will be disastrous. Our children's and grandchildren's generations are being sacrificed to political expediency.

It's not that Medicare shouldn't include a prescription drug benefit. It should, because the practice of modern medicine demands it. The problem is that Washington is making the mistake it always makes when fashioning political solutions to economic problems.

In its effort to be all things to all people and thus maximize an initiative's vote-getting potential, elected leaders invariably choose a one-size-fits-all solution. In this case, covering everyone will be ruinous not only to Medicare's finances, but also the entire federal fisc. The cost of the proposed program is put at $400 billion over 10 years, but increasing longevity and scientific advances make that estimate meaningless.

The policy mistake is to approach the problem as though every older American has the same need. This is not the case. Only one of every four Medicare participants is totally without drug coverage. Some can afford their medications better than others.

Universal drug-benefit coverage will accomplish several things -- none of them beneficial for the younger taxpayers who support Medicare. It will encourage corporations currently covering retirees to drop this coverage and let Uncle Sam pick up their drug bills. It will encourage seniors in Medicare managed-care programs with a drug benefit to return to the more costly fee-for-service Medicare option. Worst of all, though, it will treat retired millionaires the same as the poorest of poor seniors just getting by on a subsistence existence.

To what purpose? The bipartisan creators of this massive new entitlement probably will be re-elected. At what cost? As baby boomers begin to qualify for Medicare, the system already will be in dire financial peril just as the number of enrollees starts to explode.

Few people seem to understand just what a gigantic policy miscalculation this will be. The me-firsters already are front and center complaining about...what? They're griping that the proposal may not be generous enough.

While the taxpaying workers who pay most of Medicare's bills are forced into managed care programs at work, critics say efforts to link drug benefits to similar tradeoffs for Medicare coverage are "unfair."

Meanwhile, nobody has voiced the slightest concern that a humongously costly universal benefit will cause the system to collapse under its own weight and thus deprive our children and grandchildren of Medicare's protective mantle.

It's not just Washington's pols abandoning principle and responsibility. It's also society at large. Sure, Medicare should have a drug benefit, but those who get it should not only need it, but also be willing to make tradeoffs to get it.