How Chuck Grassley Saved Medicare From George Bush

The Hill reports that Chuck Grassley is working towards a compromise on health care. As ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, Grassley is a key Republican who the Obama administration will have to work with if they are going to achieve a bipartisan policy as opposed to trying to ram down a purely Democratic plan with 50% plus one, using tactics reminiscent of the Bush administration.

Considering how little interest many Republicans have in true health care reform can we trust Chuck Grassley? I don’t know if he will have anything worthwhile to offer, but he does deserve credit for helping to save the Medicare program from George Bush.

While many conservatives attack George Bush’s Medicare plan as a huge expansion of government they miss the point as to what Bush was really trying to achieve. The plan had two major benefits for the Bush administration. It was a massive give-away program to reward the insurance and pharmaceutical industries for their support. Both liberals and principled conservatives should have opposed it on these grounds. Beyond this goal, the Medicare D program as initially proposed by George Bush was a plan to destroy the Medicare program.

Bush’s Medicare plan had two main components. First there were the Medicare Advantage plans where the government pays big subsidies to private companies to treat Medicare patients at a higher cost than if they were under the government program. (So much for the conservative meme that the free market is always more efficient than government). This helps to slowly move people into private plans while running up costs– in a perverse way fulfilling the Republican goal of starving the beast. Bush’s original plan even went far further than this in speeding up the demise of the government Medicare program.

The second component of Bush’s Medicare plan was the prescription drug plan. Bush’s initial plan was to only allow seniors to have prescription drug coverage if they dropped their traditional Medicare coverage and changed to private Medicare Advantage plans. There is no doubt that this would have greatly increased the number of Medicare beneficiaries who would change to Medicare Advantage plans.

George Bush’s plan would have been very damaging to Medicare. Fortunately it was blocked, largely due to opposition from some people in Bush’s own party. Chuck Grassley was very instrumental in changing the plan so that all Medicare beneficiaries, not only those in Medicare Advantage plans, could receive prescription drug coverage.

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