It is simply amazing to me that this fraud of a program was able to ever be enacted in the first place. But then, the power of the Corporate State cannot be underestimated. This from Smartmoney.com…

You can tell a lot about a product by the way it’s sold, and the Bush administration has hawked Medicare’s prescription-drug benefit - “Part D” - almost as honestly as it rolled out the Iraq war. The results are going to start slamming millions of seniors right here, right now, in the fall of 2007.

To see why Part-D Day is at hand, you first have to understand the nasty process by which Medicare added a drug benefit.

———-

The administration and its allies went to unusual and controversial lengths to pass the drug benefit. In 2004 it sent a series of “video news releases” hyping the program to media outlets around the country. These prepackaged broadcasts seemed like news reports, and some TV stations aired them as such, but they were actually political ads. In May 2004 the Government Accountability Office found that these news stories constituted “covert propaganda” and violated publicity or propaganda prohibitions, but the GAO lacked the authority to punish anyone.

———-

Throughout the debate over the drug benefit, President Bush told Congress it would not cost more than $400 billion over 10 years, but soon after the legislation passed, it emerged that administration officials knew that information was false. From June through November 2003, Medicare’s accountants estimated the real cost of the program would run between $500 billion and $600 billion, according to congressional testimony in 2004 by Richard Foster, Medicare’s chief actuary. But Thomas Scully, then Medicare’s administrator, told Foster he would face “extremely severe” consequences if he revealed the truth to Congress. And Foster says a top lawyer at Medicare told him that Scully had the authority to gag him. That lawyer was Leslie Norwalk - a name to keep in mind.

———-

In this description, disseminated by the administration and picked up by countless journalists (including, unfortunately, me in a prior column), the gap in coverage seems to be a manageable $1,450. The very name “doughnut hole” suggests a small problem. Maybe the difference between “prescription costs” and “out-of-pocket expenses” will be confusing enough to make you stop thinking about the whole issue.

Try this on for size instead. Under Medicare’s drug benefit, you pay $4,270 of the first $5,871 in prescription costs you incur.

Packs a much stiffer wallop - both rhetorically and financially - than the first definition, doesn’t it? But it’s the same numbers, just expressed more clearly (and honestly). To get Part D’s “catastrophic” coverage, which pays for 95% of prescription costs, you’ve got to pay the premium for your policy, then a deductible, then 25% of your initial drug costs, and then, on average, another $3,000 or so to get you through the “doughnut hole.” That’s the real cost of structuring Part D as a giveaway to pharmaceutical companies. Maybe it would get some more attention if we started calling it the “Mom’s missing her meds” tax.

And this is just touching on part of this disconcerting report. Read the complete article Here