Bush Stumps for ‘Updated and Modern’ Medicare

President Bush on Thursday pressed Congress to quickly approve a Republican plan to provide limited coverage of prescription drug costs for older Americans, as the Senate prepares to debate next week an expansion of Medicare to help patients pay for such drugs.

Opposing the Senate bill, Bush favors a House-approved measure that would offer Medicare beneficiaries a prescription drug benefit while relying mainly on private insurers to administer the plan.

Bush also used his visit here to encourage the state’s voters to help return the Senate to GOP leadership. At a fund-raiser, he urged his audience to work to defeat incumbent Sen. Paul Wellstone, a Democrat, and replace him with Republican Norm Coleman, the former mayor of St. Paul.

It was the second time in four months that Bush has visited Minnesota to help Coleman in the hotly contested Senate race. Bush’s visit helped raise $1 million for Coleman and John Kline, a GOP congressional candidate.

The one-day trip halfway across the country took the president out of the nation’s capital as more attention was focused on not just the corporate accounting scandals that have roiled the U.S. stock markets, but on the president’s own past as a business executive.

Part of that attention concerns two low-interest loans he received in the late 1980s to buy stock from Harken Energy Corp., where he served as a director. The loans totaled $180,375.

In his speech Tuesday on Wall Street in which he outlined efforts to stem corporate corruption, he urged an end to such transactions.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan rejected suggestions of hypocrisy on Bush’s part. He said the loans to Bush were “completely appropriate and fully disclosed.”

“I think, even more importantly,” McClellan added, “the very definition of reform as something that is legal has now been abused, and it needs to be reformed to prevent those abuses from ever happening again.”

Bush made no public reference Thursday to the loans, using the speech he delivered before attending the fund-raiser to focus on the prescription drug issue--and to join the pharmaceutical industry’s objections to any government effort to control drug prices.

“Medicare does not cover most prescription drugs. That’s reality,” Bush said to an audience of health-care workers, students and others. “Too many of our seniors are forced to choose between paying for their pills or paying basic bills. And that’s not right in America.”

The cost of prescription drugs looms as a key issue in this year’s congressional campaigns. It is a particularly hot topic in states with large concentrations of elderly citizens, and even more so in states along the northern border.

In Minnesota and other states close to Canada, many older people take buses across the border--occasionally joined by political candidates riding along to draw attention to the issue--to buy cheaper prescription medicines.

Bush, as has the drug industry, portrayed efforts by Democrats such as Wellstone to control drug costs as putting innovation at risk.

The president devoted much of his speech to recounting the innovations of U.S. medicine. He said that, as the Senate debates how to help the elderly pay for prescription drugs, lawmakers should be careful not to undermine the medical industry’s “capacity to be on the cutting edge of new technologies which save lives.”

“We need a Medicare system that is updated and modern to serve the seniors of today with the medicine of today,” Bush said, “and to be able to serve the seniors of tomorrow--guys like me--with the medicines of tomorrow.”

He cited a study released by the Department of Health and Human Services that says too much regulation could curb seniors citizens’ access to drug breakthroughs.

Bush’s argument drew criticism from advocates of more prescription drug coverage in Medicare.

Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, an advocacy group for health-care consumers, said the Bush plan backed “the pharmaceutical lobby’s search for greater profits rather than consumers’--and especially senior citizens’--needs for more affordable medicines.”

“The Bush administration has been lured hook, line, and sinker by the pharmaceutical lobby’s misleading claim that high drug prices are needed to sustain research and development.”

The House passed the GOP-favored prescription drug plan June 28. It would cost $350 billion over 10 years; a plan offered by Democrats would have cost $800 billion.

Under the GOP plan, the new drug benefit would be provided not through Medicare but through subsidies to private insurers that offer benefits. Beneficiaries would pay premiums of $33 a month and have a deductible of $250 a year--although those fees would be paid by the government for the poor.

The program would cover 80% of drug expenses from $250 to $1,000 and 50% up to $2,000. Then there would be a gap in coverage that has been heavily criticized by Democrats: Beneficiaries would have to pay all of their expenses until their total costs hit $3,700. At that point, the government would pick up the whole bill.

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), who scheduled debate on the Democratic measure for next week, has called the House plan “sham” coverage.