Medicare Part D

Medicare Part D is going to be a nightmare. Liberals will blame George Bush, conservatives will blame the idiot Washington bureaucracy. I lean toward the latter, but don't exonerate the former. This program, designed to get prescription drug coverage for seniors and the disabled, is a neither fish-nor-fowl public-private partnership. For the next two months, people will be unable to get their correct medications because they filled out the forms wrong. And no wonder, as the forms are not clear.

Odd edges keep sticking out of this program. If you are a biggish small person, you qualify for benefit X but not Y. If you are a smallish big person, you get both X and Y, but you have to pay extra. Unless of course your smallish bigness is small, in which case the cost is paid by the government, except Part Y, which is only for biggish small people.

Yes, this is classic federal bureaucracy run amok, with lots of unknown people getting the program tilted their way so they can make money while senior citizens tremble that they won't get their blood pressure meds. But George Bush has this idiocy over his signature, and clearly wasn't making simplification a high priority here. Maybe this bells-and-whistles junk got traded for votes on things I also think is important, but right now I'm not impressed.