Memory Lane

This was a week ago, but Jon Cohn at The New Republic does something so rare in our political discourse: he remembers what happened before:

So what happened on the day that this complex program (Medicare) was implemented? Thousands of senior citizens simply went to the hospital and got the health care they needed. "There were no crises that I remember," says Yale University political scientist Theodore Marmor, who worked in the office overseeing Medicare implementation and went on to write The Politics of Medicare, the program's definitive history. Newspaper accounts from the '60s back him up. Under the headline "medicare takes over easily," a Post writer described the program's first day as "a smooth transition, undramatic as a bed change." Three weeks later, the Times affirmed that "medicare's start has been smooth."

When you get a party in power who holds government in contempt, how can you be surprised that they bungle government programs and services? Like Harry Reid said today (making up for that puzzling apology last week), "Republicans run good campaigns, but when it comes to actually governing and protecting Americans, they have a record of incompetence."

Kevin Drum adds:

There's nothing inevitable about the chaos we're seeing with the prescription drug rollout. If the program had been designed with patients in mind, it would have rolled out smoothly. But it wasn't. It was designed to benefit corporate special interests and to provide a test bed for crackpot free market theories.

And a big payout to the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, let's not forget that. Heck, the WaPo reported the other day that Congress just saved the insurance industry $22 billion in the budget by changing the technical language of the bill in the middle of the night.

I keep coming back to this prescription drug thing because, well, first, you have old people in the streets begging for their medicines. But also, this is a bright light shining on a political party that views everything in political terms, that simply has no idea how to govern and no interest in doing so. They consolidate power for the sake of consolidating power. This isn't about changing the country. It's about winning. And making each other rich. Nothing else.