{"id":1936,"date":"2004-06-14T13:56:50","date_gmt":"2004-06-14T18:56:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/1936.html"},"modified":"2004-06-14T13:56:50","modified_gmt":"2004-06-14T18:56:50","slug":"bush-hoping-in-vain-to-score-political-points-off-medicare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/bush-hoping-in-vain-to-score-political-points-off-medicare\/","title":{"rendered":"Bush hoping in vain to score political points off Medicare"},"content":{"rendered":"

If a comedian has to explain why a punch line is funny, the joke isn’t any good. And if a president has to explain why his signature domestic policy achievement really isn’t a disaster, that president has a problem.<\/p>\n

Case in point: Bush and Medicare<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Bush will travel to Liberty, Mo., in a key battleground state he won by 3 percentage points in the 2000 election. He will talk about the Medicare prescription-drug program that took effect last month to provide federal subsidies and discount cards designed to help low-income seniors pay for prescription drugs.<\/p>\n

Passage of the law was expected to be a political plus for the president as he seeks re-election. But it has been dogged by controversy and confusion, despite a $50 million government ad campaign to inform users of its benefits.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s a bit of an understatement. The entire White House Medicare initiative has been a debacle from the beginning. The administration had to lie about the plan’s cost to get it passed (a scandal that is already under investigation<\/a>); congressional leaders had to try and bribe lawmakers to vote for it (another scandal under investigation<\/a>); and the administration ran expensive and deceptive ads that turned out to be criminally wrong<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And best of all, seniors don’t want anything to do with the program<\/a> and feel like they’ve been conned.<\/p>\n

“You are not in a good political position if you have to go out and explain your program because people don’t understand it,” says Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n


\nThe administration, for unknown reasons, continues to be optimistic.<\/p>\n

Medicare chief Mark McClellan, a Bush appointee, told a Senate hearing last week that more than 3 million seniors are signed up for Medicare drug-discount cards…. The administration expects about 7.3 million seniors to apply for the cards.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What McClellan didn’t mention is that of the 3 million who signed up, 2.4 million did so involuntarily<\/i> — their HMOs enrolled them automatically, which makes the numbers look better than they really are.<\/p>\n

But if Bush wants to travel to key swing states to talk about an unpopular policy, wrought with scandal, that the intended beneficiaries hate, I think that’s terrific. I can only hope he keeps it up throughout the campaign.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If a comedian has to explain why a punch line is funny, the joke isn’t any good. And if a president has to explain why his signature domestic policy achievement really isn’t a disaster, that president has a problem. Case in point: Bush and Medicare. Bush will travel to Liberty, Mo., in a key battleground […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1936"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1936\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}