A Leap Toward Socialized Medicine -- By One Vote

July 2, 2003

Scott Holleran

Tel: (818) 842-2060

E-Mail: scott@afcm.org

Last week, Congress approved President Bush's expansion of Medicare by one vote. Once Bush signs the bill, every American over age 65 will lose the freedom to choose, pay for and control drug treatments. The proposal, set to start in three years, is a plan only Hillary Clinton could love.

In fact, its core premise -- medical treatment controlled by the state - is an exact application of the Clinton health care philosophy. The similarity is not lost on the Clinton administration's former Medicare administrator, Nancy-Ann DeParle, who told the Washington Post: Democrats should do everything they can to whisk [the Medicare bill] to [Bush's] desk. In signing it, as he will surely be forced to do, he will preside over the biggest expansion of government health benefits since the Great Society.

Even the conservative Heritage Foundation, which rarely opposes any Bush administration notion, opposed the Medicare reform. Heritage called it an unforgivable failure of leadership. The conservative newspaper Human Events, labeled the GOP-backed bills fiscally and morally indefensible.

Conservatives denounced Bush and the GOP too late. Both House and Senate versions of the bill control the cost and distribution of drugs for older Americans -- three quarters of whom already have private drug coverage -- and grant government the power to define what drugs are acceptable for seniors and how much they will cost.

Seniors with their own private coverage are likely to lose it. The government's Congressional Budget Office estimates that 37 percent of all the nation's employers will eliminate their retired employees' drug benefits. The real percentage is probably much higher.

Rationing health care for older Americans is, in a certain sense, Medicare's destiny; it had to happen. In 1965, on the premise that health care is a right, government forced doctors and hospitals to treat everyone over age 65 by rates and standards determined by the state --- while preserving a patients' right to choose his or her doctor. Predictably, with health care for seniors subsidized, patients and doctors used medicine more than necessary, driving costs up. Over the years, socialized medicine for seniors has completely distorted the market in medicine.

Bush and the GOP-controlled Congress have abandoned the free market approach -- protecting free choice by gradually eliminating subsidized health care for seniors -- because it has been deemed politically impossible. Instead, Bush's Medicare bill lets bureaucrats control how, when, where - and whether -- older Americans receive treatment.

The Medicare bill puts to rest the notion that Bush and today's Republicans are seriously opposed to government-run health care. As one Republican -- quoted in an Associated Press story -- put it: We just caved. Bush's handpicked Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist, recently proclaimed: What we do ... will affect every American. Frist is right: what he's done will make practicing and receiving medicine much worse.

President Bush, who has broken promises on everything from expanding medical savings accounts (MSAs) to opposing campaign finance reform, is advancing government-controlled health care faster than Hillary Clinton. As the New York Times described Bush's encouragement of the Medicare bill, [Bush] has signaled, repeatedly, [his] willingness to compromise on ... free market principles.

The President's latest compromise makes Bush the nation's foremost advocate of state-run health care -- which, for every American, means less choice, higher costs and one huge step toward socialized medicine.

Scott Holleran (scott@afcm.org) is a health care correspondent and commentator. Holleran was a campaign aide and congressional assistant to House Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Rep. John Porter, (R, IL,). Holleran's articles have been published in the Wall Street Journal, Silicon Valley Business Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times.

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