WASHINGTON, D.C. -- It is time to take a break from geopolitics and war, and to write about a matter that is near to my heart, health care. I write as a confirmed hypochondriac. I have more medicines in my medicine cabinet than Arianna Huffington.

In fact, I have more medicine cabinets than Arianna Huffington, and I did not even have to divorce a multimillionaire to afford my multitudes of medicine cabinets. I have a half-dozen personal physicians. The only docs I avoid are plastic surgeons, and that is because they would have me looking like Sen. John Pierre Kerry.

Thus, you might think I am exultant over the advance of the new prescription drug bills through Congress that our solons plan to append to Medicare. Actually, I am not. As these bills approach the conference committee where they will be reconciled, I reach for the Prozac. They are unfunded. They are likely to lack market-based reforms. They will force all of us into a health care straitjacket.

We hypochondriacs need to be able to make choices. What strikes me as an unendurable affliction might strike you as a hangnail. Yet I might want to take my hangnail to a doctor and I ought to be able to, assuming I pay for it. With a proper array of health care programs available to me, I just might be able to get insurance for my hangnails.

The basic thing that all of us -- hypochondriacs and the physically fit alike -- need to remember about health policy is a condition that the great economist Milton Friedman recognized a generation or more ago, to wit: Health care demand is elastic. The cheaper and more available it is, the more it will be in demand. If it were free, we hypochondriacs would be in the doctor's office all the time. At least, we would be in the doctor's office if the doc's fees were paid by government -- and if government did not regulate care, thus restricting procedures.

The restriction of procedures is just one of the problems with Medicare. The other is that it is underfunded and will go bust someday. Scholars at the American Enterprise Institute calculate that Medicare's long-term shortfall is more than $30 trillion. If the contemplated prescription drug coverage is thrown in, add another $6 trillion to $12 trillion. And still I cannot get my hangnails treated.

As the shortfall mounts, ordinary Americans will not be able to get some genuinely urgent procedures covered. In fact, services are being cut back even now. In the years to come, there will be more cutbacks in Medicare and a huge tax increase.

The government cannot run unfunded programs forever. Yet with the present prescription drug bills now headed for conference, that is about what the politicians are contemplating. To repeat the unspoken truth of these prescription-care bills is that they are not even funded. Continued...