Prescription Debacle
January 20th, 2006 by JoshSometimes, just when you think the levels of incompetency, corruption, and near-criminality in the BushCo administration can’t get any worse, they up the ante and pull another one out of their bag of crap. Krugman, via Atrios (who reposted the entire thing “for educational purposes”):
The new prescription drug benefit is off to a catastrophic start. Tens of thousands of older Americans have arrived at pharmacies to discover that their old drug benefits have been canceled, but that they aren’t on the list for the new program. More than two dozen states have taken emergency action.
At first, federal officials were oblivious. “This is going very well,” a Medicare spokesman declared a few days into the disaster. Then officials started making excuses. Some conservatives even insist that the debacle vindicates their ideology: see, government can’t do anything right.
But government works when it’s run by people who take public policy seriously. As Jonathan Cohn points out in The New Republic, when Medicare began 40 years ago, things went remarkably smoothly from the start. But this time the people putting together a new federal program had one foot out the revolving door: this was a drug bill written by and for lobbyists.
…
Mr. Scully had good reasons not to let anything stand in the way of the drug bill. He had received a special ethics waiver from his superiors allowing him to negotiate for future jobs with lobbying and investment firms – firms that had a strong financial stake in the form of the bill – while still in public office. He left public service, if that’s what it was, almost as soon as the bill was passed, and is once again a lobbyist, now for drug companies.
Meanwhile, Representative Billy Tauzin, the bill’s point man on Capitol Hill, quickly left Congress once the bill was passed to become president of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the powerful drug industry lobby.
Go read the entire thing over at Eschaton. Krugman wonderfully ties together the threads of this debacle and the political machine that is at the center of the Abramoff and Delay scandals. He concludes with an important question.
So I have a question for my colleagues in the news media: Why isn’t the decision by the White House to stonewall on the largest corruption scandal since Warren Harding considered major news?
January 25th, 2006 at 1:13 pm
I actually work at a government subsidiary helping the rollout of this new rx coverage. Its perhaps the worst program Ive ever seen, trying to implement 11 million former medicaid prescription beneficiaries into a program overnight. We have customer service reps that work for us that have people on the phone on a daily basis actually near death because they havent had critical medications since the first of the year. Even better, until last week, pharmacists were forbidden to advise these people on any decisions. How does the government expect the poorest of the poor. The elderly of our country to understand the jargon and BS associated with this plan? Its obvious to me that this is nothing more than a good way to line the pockets of the rich especially pharmaceutical companies and private insurance entities that sponser the regional plans.
Total crap, I acutally feel unethical coming to work.