Entitlements

There is much talk in the blogosphere about budget cuts to offset what is projected to be breath-taking in expendatures for rebuilding the Gulf Coast. The only real place to do this is in entitlements.Of course, it won’t be easy. Ameri cans are too comfortable with their Social Security and Medicare benefits to let them be trimmed without a vicious fight. There is one entitlement, however, that Americans haven’t gotten their claws into because it’s not scheduled to start until Jan. 1: the Medicare prescription drug benefit. To offset the spending on Hurricane Katrina relief and reconstruction, the Republican Study Committee is proposing cuts that will save nearly $103 billion in 2006, $370 billion over five years and $950 billion over 10. Part of Operation Offset’s savings just happens to come from delaying by one year the start of the prescription drug benefit. Not a bad start. Here’s a great finish: Kill the program before it becomes entrenched and begins to metastasize. As Congress debated the prescription drug benefit for the elderly, the country was told it would cost $400 billion over 10 years. No way. Government programs always grow far beyond their forecast costs. Here are some examples:

• Consider Medicare. When it was launched in 1965, we were told it would cost $9 billion a year by 1990. Twenty-five years later, its cost was $67 billion. When a special hospital subsidy was added in 1987, Washington said it would cost $100 million in five years. Real cost: $11 billion.
  
• Then there was the 1988 projection that Medicare’s home-care program would cost $4 billion by 1993. Five years later, spending was in fact $10 billion.

So it will be with the Medicare prescription benefit. Sen. John McCain said it’s now projected to cost $730 billion over 10 years, a jump of nearly 83% before the first pill is popped. Even that figure’s a bit misleading, because it doesn’t include $134 billion that will be spent by the states, plus other Washington budget tricks. The real cost is going to be closer to $1.2 trillion.
Clearly, the drug benefit will be a budget buster. Surely the Bush administration understands that by enlarging the welfare state now, they'll bleed the public dry later. Tom Delay had to keep the vote open nearly all night to get the thing passed in the House. Killing it with a new Majority Leader should be easy. Hope someone has the courage to challenge the big-spending Bush and kill this baby in its crib.