President Bush is reportedly having trouble selling his plan for Social Security reform in Washington. Could it be that even members of his own party are a bit reticent because they don’t feel the prescription drug benefit included in his Medicare reform package was presented as candidly as it should have been?
When the Medicare drug plan was passed in 2003, the country was told it would cost about $400 billion over 10 years. Skeptics who know a thing or two about government programs figured it would cost more than that. And they were right. Within a couple of months, the price was revised upward to $534 billion.
Then came a later estimate that is even worse: $724 billion from 2005 to 2015, an increase of more than 83% over what appears was an initial guess rather than an estimate. And now the Congressional Budget Office says it will be $849 billion to 2015.
And the program hasn’t even kicked in yet. And we know that utilization is always higher than the estimates.
The president deserves credit for taking on the Social Security monster. Who could blame Bush’s GOP colleagues, though, for being a bit uneasy about his plans to patch up the fading New Deal program, which include personal accounts that are established with dollars diverted from payroll taxes?
The real resistance to Bush’s plan is from stubborn Democrats who refuse to admit that one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s beloved programs is no better than any of the other socialist programs that have failed over the decades. They are saying they won’t discuss any changes to Social Security until the president takes personal accounts off the table.
The irony here is that the administration pushed Medicare through, in part, to ensure that Republicans would continue to control Congress and the White House so they could pass Social Security reform. Yet pushing through a costly Medicare bill may have undermined any chances of reforming Social Security.