The extremely intelligent Len Burman does not like the fact that the prescription drug benefit under consideration comes without a funding source:
Posted by DeLong at November 21, 2003 02:58 PM | TrackBackTax Policy Center | A Project of the Urban Institute & the Brookings Institution: ...The proposed prescription drug benefit under Medicare and associated tax subsidies for health savings accounts may not directly dig the Medicare hole deeper, but they represent a major expansion of the Medicare program, which will only partially be financed by premiums. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the new program will cost $394 billion over the next decade--more than four times the projected Medicare surpluses over the same period ($88 billion). The costs in the first decade, however, understate the long run costs because prescription drug coverage under Medicare does not begin until 2006. Assuming that costs will grow at the rate of overall Medicare outlays, the second ten years would cost nearly $1 trillion. In fact, if recent trends continue, prescription drug costs are likely to grow faster than overall health spending, so this is likely to be an underestimate...
This is what amazes about the Medicare bill. Forget about distributional effects, and cherry picking and HSAs; those are second-order problems. We're about to create an enormous entitlement, that we're not paying for, at a time of huge deficits, and we still have to deal with the baby-boomers retirement--and now we've made that much _more_ expensive.
_And no one seems to care!_ No comments here, either. Sad.