HIDDEN? IT WAS THE POINT OF THE LAW:

Medicare's Hidden Bonanza: After millions in campaign contributions, an insurance magnate's 10-year lobbying campaign finally pays off. (Michael Scherer, March/April 2004, Mother Jones)

For conservative leaders, the best part of the Medicare bill President Bush signed in December had absolutely nothing to do with Medicare. Rather, the provision that House Speaker Dennis Hastert calls "the most important piece in the bill" and former Speaker Newt Gingrich considers "the single most important change in health care policy in 60 years" is a little-noticed tax rebate set to cost the Treasury $6.4 billion over the next decade. The measure allows Americans to open tax-free "health savings accounts," which can be used to pay medical bills—in effect removing their owners from the shared risk that has been the core of the health-insurance system since World War II.

One problem with assuming your political opponents are always doing things that are merely expedient is that you blind yourself to their often obvious real intent. So, when Democrats, libertarians and the rest look at the Medicare law that the President ram-rodded through, they think he was just trying to buy the votes of seniors, when, in fact, he was buying them off. If the price of passing the significant social welfare reform that is embodied in HSA's was tossing the seniors their pharmaceutical bone, so be it--just as the price of school vouchers was a little extra federal money for education. Mr. Bush keeps building the infrastructuure of the Opportunity Society and laying the groundwork for permanent Republican control of the government cash spigot, yet the perceptive stories like this one are few and far between.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 30, 2004 8:43 PM