From today’s Washington Times, comes yet more evidence that the leaders of the GOP have abandoned any semblance of the principles they claim to believe in.
Rep. Joe Barton and Sen. Charles Grassley, respectively the chairmen of the House Energy and Commerce and Senate Finance Committee, were supposed to come up with ways to reduce Medicare and Medicaid spending. Instead, they actually increase it, specifically by asking taxpayers to pick up the full cost of Medicaid in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana (that’s on top of health-care funds for the victims of Katrina in those states), raising physician fees paid by the two programs by about $10 billion a year, and adding middle-class families to those entitled to Medicaid or state-run children’s health plans.Both chairmen propose to pay for this spending spree by imposing price controls on all drugs. Prices for drugs could not be higher than a new federal formula; particularly newer medicines that allow people to get their cancer care at home instead of the hospital. And for good measure, both lawmakers plan to eliminate generic-drug competition — from brand drugmakers — in order to enrich other generic drugmakers. Quite simply, if a brand drug company wants to take any of its products generic, Messrs. Barton and Grassley would have Medicaid — which gets the best price companies give to private health plans — use the generic price as the government-set price for remaining brand name business.
If I didn’t know better, I would say that this was something proposed by Howard Dean or Russ Feingold, but no, its the supposed fiscal conservatives and believers in the free market in the Republican Party that would inflict this latest insane idea upon us. And don’t depend on the White House to do anything to stop it.
You would think that the White House might have a shred of principle and oppose such approaches, particularly when it had already come up with $10 billion of savings without resorting to such twisted measures. But apparently the Office of Management and Budget thinks that expanding entitlements, price controls and protectionism are just dandy ways to achieve “deficit reduction.” (It should have checked with the FDA, which has found generic competition by brand companies to be pro-competitive.) Ironically, since few Democrats will vote for Republican-initiated proposals under any circumstances, it will be left to Republicans on each committee to endorse policies that they would be attacking if the Dems had proposed them.
Given what the Bush Administration has done to the federal budget over the past 5 years, this is not a surprise at all. What is a surprise is that its taken the Times this long to figure it out.
Republicans are complaining about Harriet Miers as some sort of failure of ideology on the part of the president. The problem goes much deeper and the blame spreads wider still. This is a party that has lost both its principles and leadership. By abandoning the Reagan legacy they will bankrupt America in more ways than one.
You said it.
