The Entitlement Cock-up

There’s one rule of government that conservatives hold dear: Once a group is given an entitlement or benefit, they’ll fight like hell to keep it.  That’s why Bush had to struggle so hard to convince folks that his Privatization idea was about saving Social Security, rather than gutting it, as was the plan.  They knew it’d be suicide to outright take the program away, so they had to convince people that it was actually better than Social Security; that it wouldn’t be there for you when you needed it and this was just like Social Security Plus.  And even trying to sell that idea got them rotten tomatoes and popularity problems.  Their plan was a crappy and dangerous one, and that didn’t even factor-in their eventual plan to completely destroy it.

For whatever crazy reason, people like to keep shit that helps them, and once you’ve shown that the government can perform a service, people expect it to keep performing.  The conservatives know that, and that’s why they hate successful government programs more than the crappy ones; because one successful program will beget another.  And while they might not object to all government on an individual basis, for practical reasons, the True Conservatives (of the Buckley variety) know that they must oppose all of them.  This is a guiding principle of conservatism and explains their opposition to all but the most essential government services.

So how they forgot about this rule when they designed the Medicare Part D program is a story that will need to be told someday, because that was a complete cock-up for them.  I’m guessing it was greed and election-year jitters that did it; plus the fact that many Republican Congressmen aren’t True Conservatives, but only adopt the rhetoric for political reasons, without understanding any of it.  The Republicans have always been very very sensitive about the Seniors vote, and I think they thought they had a two-fer: They’d get to run on Medicare, rather than run away from it, and they could make their Big Pharma clients…ahem, constituents happy.  And they got that, in the short-term.  It was a lousy plan, but it was so blasted incomprehensible that Dems couldn’t run on its lousiness…yet.

But what happens next?  Can anyone honestly believe that they’re going to keep things as they are?  Hell no, everyone’s pissed and it’s a crappy system.  Will they scrap it and go back to the old system?  Hell no, as I said, conservatives know damn well that it’s political suicide to take back a plan like that.  Old folks want their drugs, and now that they’ve been promised it, that’s what they’re going to expect.  So what can they do?  Improve it.  That’s their only real option.  And if the Repubs don’t improve it soon, the old folks will vote in some Dems who certainly will.  And in either case, it’s going to be a lot more expensive and a lot more intrusive than what any conservative could want.  Plus, Big Pharma will certainly lose their negotiating strength, once they deal with a united drug plan; and the insurance biz will be tossed-off of the gravytrain.  And again, if this program is successful, it’ll just remind people of how well the government can work sometimes.

Overall, the Republicans seem to be slowly learning the lesson that there are few real shortcuts in life and that a plan that seems too good to be true probably is.  They thought they could create a cheap government program that used private industry as a profitable middleman (one which funnels part of the taxpayer profits back to the GOP); and ended up with an expensive nightmare that just doesn’t work.  They thought they could easily shore-up the Seniors vote, but have just given Dems yet another issue to run on.  They thought they could run as pro-people conservatives, and ended up giving us yet another expensive fringe benefit for being an old American.  

But then again, isn’t that all just a paraphrase for what went wrong in Iraq too?  And many other Bush programs?  They’re trying to burn the candlestick at both ends, but just end up getting burned.  If they all weren’t spending sleepless nights worrying about their own dealings with Jack Abramoff, I’m sure they’d be quietly screaming themselves to sleep each night over this.  Overall, this is yet more reason why a “small government” party can’t run the government; it’s nice rhetoric, until you’re expected to actually do things.  And then it’s just one cock-up after another.