President Bush promised Congress that his Medicare prescription drug benefit would cost no more than $400 billion over 10 years, but once the legislation was enacted, federal actuaries boosted the estimate to $534 billion. Now, Bush administration projections indicate that the cost could be considerably higher.<\/p>\n
According to internal White House budget office estimates of the long-term cost of Medicare, spending related to the new drug benefit could increase by $42 billion over the coming decade. <\/p>\n
The revised figure appears in a chart prepared during this summer’s “mid-session review” by the Office of Management and Budget and Medicare actuaries. The document provides a detailed breakdown of an extra $176 billion in Medicare spending projected for the next 10 years. The chart, provided to The Washington Post late last week, identifies $42 billion of that increase “as related to MMA,” the initials of the Medicare Modernization Act, the new prescription drug law. <\/p>\n
Several budget analysts said the chart indicates that the price tag of the president’s new drug program could total as much as $576 billion over 10 years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Remember, the administration sold the Medicare scam to Congress on the promise that the program wouldn’t cost a penny more than $400 billion. That was less than a year ago.<\/p>\n
What do you say we ask Congress to vote again on the same legislation, now that lawmakers have a more realistic picture of what it’s going to cost? Do you think the White House would be confident in pulling off this con again?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I think I’ve determined why the Bush administration’s domestic policies keep failing — they’re bad at math. At a minimum, that would shed some light on how Bush’s Medicare scheme continues to get worse all the time. President Bush promised Congress that his Medicare prescription drug benefit would cost no more than $400 billion over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2566","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=2566"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2566\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}