The vote on the White House’s Medicare plan — which sort of included a prescription drug benefit — was intended to be a political boon for Republicans. It obviously hasn’t worked out that way and the GOP seems confused as to why. It really isn’t that complicated.
As the Washington Post reported over the weekend, the “political bounce that Republicans had hoped for is eluding them, as critics rail against the new law and voters say they still trust Democrats more on the issue.”
Sure, the criticisms have been largely successful in pointing out the bill’s numerous flaws, but that’s the tip of the iceberg. Since the bill passed in November, the whole scheme has been rocked by scandal. First there was Rep. Nick Smith (R-Mich.) alleging that he was offered bribes in exchange for his vote. Second, there were the taxpayer-financed ads that were deceptive about the actual changes to the law. Third, the White House quietly admitted that it had been lying all along about the price of the Medicare plan, having understated its true cost by over $100 billion.
But the bottom line is even more basic. Most people don’t really know about the bill and those who do don’t like it.
Instead of pleasing voters, the law has spawned discontent. Asked about the Medicare changes, a quarter of the respondents in a Gallup/CNN/USA Today poll last month said they are “about right,” while 32 percent of the older Americans who said they knew about the law had a favorable impression of it, according to a new Kaiser Family Foundation survey. The GOP is reaping little credit for pushing the drug benefits into law; 53 percent of the people who answered a Washington Post/ABC News poll in January said they trusted congressional Democrats to do a better job handling Medicare, while 35 percent selected President Bush.
Complicating matters, the survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that most people don’t even realize that Bush’s Medicare plan is actually current law — nearly 70 percent of those polled did not understand that it was a bill passed in Congress and signed into law by the president.
Meanwhile, people — particularly elderly voters — are finding that the law fails to meet their needs and expectations, making the entire scheme a political loser for the GOP on their only substantive domestic achievement in recent years. Yesterday, Ruy Teixeira identified some of the election-year pitfalls:
These data suggest a couple of key areas of vulnerability for the GOP around this bill: inadequate coverage and no curbs on prices.
Of the two, inadequate coverage presents the most glaring vulnerability. As the data above suggest, seniors already see the benefit, in a general way, as not going far enough. And, once seniors are informed of the specifics of the coverage, particularly the “doughnut hole” in coverage between $2250 and $5100 in out-of-pocket costs, it really sends them through the roof, according to both news stories and focus group research.
This is just not what seniors had in mind when they envisioned a prescription drug benefit. As nonpartisan analyst Charlie Cook presciently observed back in July of last year, when negative sentiment about the impending bill was starting to become obvious:
Even the most cursory look at polling data and reports from focus groups indicates that senior citizens have very specific ideas of what they expect in a prescription drug benefit. What they have in mind is something resembling what a Fortune 500 company provides (or used to provide) employees: A modest premium, minimal co-pay, no gaps, no restrictions on what drugs physicians can prescribe and unlimited coverage.
Cook concluded, given that the drug benefit likely to be passed didn’t look anything like this:
If the prescription drug benefit is a factor in next year’s election, it will be as an albatross around the necks of Republicans and the Bush administration.
Exactly. Seniors just aren’t getting anything close to what they had in mind and this discrepancy, so vividly encapsulated in the doughnut hole, is potentially a very, very serious problem for the GOP.