The Republican's Poison Pill

This is cross-posted in the Editorials forum. This is THE issue. Let's do everything we can to rally the Dems to make this the winning issue.



From the article:



And the bill itself was a massive special-interest giveaway. Republicans packed it with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of subsidies to their corporate donors. (In fact, Scully negotiated for a job as a lobbyist with one such beneficiary even while helping craft the bill.) The giveaways made the bill far more expensive than necessary. Yale political scientists Theodore Marmor and Jacob Hacker estimated that a better bill could have offered the same benefit for half the cost.

What's more, the insistence on satiating the private sector is what made the plan so complex. It forces millions of poor senior citizens out of Medicaid and into private plans subsidized by Medicare. It's so complex precisely because it funnels people through the private sector.

By contrast, the original Medicare program, as my New Republic colleague Jonathan Cohn writes, was simple, user-friendly and went off without a hitch at its inception because it used a straightforward government mechanism.

The beautiful thing about the drug-benefit fiasco is that every one of the GOP's tawdriest habits were on full display. The phony numbers, the sucking up to corporate lobbyists, the dictatorial management of the House, the fanatical partisanship — all these are the hallmarks of the modern Republican style.

And what's more, conservatives loathe this bill, so the more Democrats talk about it, the more it divides the GOP base.

MORE. Please see <http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=103&topic_id=186383&mesg_id=186383>

Dems need to exploit it, its been a huge disaster for the GOP.

Abramoff is taking the focus off of this Medicare nightmare. It hits home to millions of people. Voting millions. We can celebrate as each R thug goes down but, in my opinion, this takes down the whole party.

I've sent emails to my 2 Senators imploring them to put their attention to this more than Congressional reform. It is the difference between leading and following. If the Dems would set the pace with this and other important issues instead of 'our reform is better than their reform', we could put the thugs in a tailspin!

for all of us.

Not that super confusing thing they're trying to do with drugs on my disability check but your post I like! I fortunately already have national health care with free drugs... it's called VA, so they can shove their little scam deeply into a crevice where the sun doesn't shine.... It always looked like a shell game to me for defrauding seniors out of their meager fixed incomes.

but along with the complete mess this overhaul has created, many corporations were given billions of dollars. And the real cost was hidden for so long...where is the outrage?